When water ran out, they were always smart enough to move on.

Photos by Hildy GottliebCopyright 2000 ©

Not us. That basic irony, that we stay where we shouldn't, sets us up for all the other contradictions and contrasts that make up life in the Old Pueblo.

I've spent my whole adult life in Tucson, Arizona precisely because I was certain, at age 22, that I would be spending my life in New York. That starts my own personal irony.

Just graduated from New York's prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology, I wanted to see the rest of the country before spending what I knew would be the rest of my life in the garment district. Before leaving, I bought enough wool to make 3 suits for interviewing when I returned and headed out west with my 1971 Dodge Coronet, a backpack and my sewing machine.

Now it's 20 years later. Marriage, kid, a business, divorce, another business, friends, lovers, another business again. The wool, permanently faded along the folds, still sits in a chest in my living room. New York City is now a place I love to visit, but Tucson is home.

As for my partner, the fact that Greek was Dimitri's first language, being born into a Greek-speaking household in Tucson, Arizona, USA, is great fuel for cocktail party banter. But Dimitri was raised here by a Greek peasant, who herself had grown up sans running water or electricity, whose life was tending the fields and feeding the goats, and who somehow wound up here in the desert, where the mountains remind her of her home in the heart of the Peloponnese.

Tucson does that. It will take the son of a Greek peasant, put him in business with someone who knew in her heart she would never live anywhere but New York City, and not blink. Life here is always rich, always unexpected.

The desert itself is dry, unless it's wet, and then it's real wet. In 1983, Tucson's floods were on the national news, with footage of houses falling into the rushing Rillito River - the same Rillito that is so bone dry throughout the year that newcomers joke, "Only in the desert would they call dry dirt a river!" Violent lightning hit 3 boys playing hooky from high school just last week. And the most popular postcards from Arizona are dramatic shots of saguaros against stormy lightning-filled skies. Dry as a bone. Unless it rains.

The desert itself is dry, unless it's wet, and then it's real wet.

Photos by Hildy Gottlieb Copyright 2000 ©

The desert has cacti with thorns to impale you, with spines that have a sheath around them, so that when you remove the spine, the sheath stays inside you to cause pain for weeks. And then, just up the mountain, there's cool shade and soft pine-laden ground and ferns so covered in lady bugs that you can't see the green for their red. In the winter, we head up the mountain, just an hour's drive, to play in the snow, and then we return to the desert and swim in our pools, all in one day. It's cold and hot, dry and wet, soft and green and sharp and brown, all at once.

Photos by Hildy Gottlieb Copyright 2000 ©

Ferns so covered in lady bugs that you can't see the green for their red.

History itself is contradiction here. Everyone knows the history of Indians in the west. Over 100 years ago, the army built a fort here in Southern Arizona to keep the Apaches at bay - Fort Huachuca. 100 years later, Fort Huachuca is still an army post, and American Indians from all over the United States are stationed there, preparing to defend the country that took their land. Imagine modern-day Apache soldiers, training at the very fort that was established just to kill their ancestors.

Contrast and irony. Until a year or so ago, downtown Tucson was the home of the world's longest non-mechanized parade - the Rodeo Parade. There in downtown Tucson, rodeo riders at one end of the parade would be trotting past Tucson's oldest skyscraper, the red brick Bank One Building, while horse folk at the other end of the parade would be winding past the modern red steel sculpture in front of the modern marble and glass library, leaving a trail of meadow muffins along our modern downtown streets. School kids in Tucson may not have off for Columbus Day, but they have 2 days off in February - Rodeo Days. Go figure.

The red brick Bank One Building, through the modern steel sculpture at the library.

Photos by Hildy Gottlieb Copyright 2000 ©

In the work we do, we get to experience the grandest irony of all - the glory in people who are working to save other people from horror. We get to see the good side of every bad story in the newspaper, working intimately with the folks who, every day, believe they can make their piece of the world a better place. No matter how bad the situation, there are these angels who put their lives on the line every day, just to make it ok for someone else, and we get to watch them up close.

These are regular folks - just like you and me. Volunteer board members who just want the community to be healthier, or to stop child abuse, or to stop kids from being hungry. Individual staff members, trying to produce a tv show about the desert or boxing up food for the housebound. Regular working people who collect diapers in their offices, year after year, because they know that poor people can't afford them. Tribal business managers, trying to make a living not just for themselves, but for the reservation as a whole.

Photos by Hildy Gottlieb Copyright 2000 ©

Regular working people who collect diapers because poor people can't afford them.

It is a culmination of ironies and contradictions that bring Dimitri and I to the work we do. Each of us, as idealistic youth, held political jobs that were supposed to change the world, but wound up just being politics. Each of us has felt that there has to be a way to take the talents and skills we've acquired over our working years, and apply them to some greater good. Our talents, these gifts, are not for us to keep, but for us to give to someone else, or they wouldn't be called gifts. Maybe that's the ultimate irony.

The gift we receive every day is that we get to do the work we do, in a community so rich and alive it would take your breath away. We are excited to show you our home, from all its contradictory angles. Sit back and let us tell you a story.....