The advantages, and disadvantages, of living in a small town - Phoenix, Arizona


When I moved back to Phoenix from Los Angeles in 1989, I had to put on a brave face about the move, and not complain about it. The reality was that LA proved too much for this man, and when I got laid off from a great corporate job, I took a good look around me, and didn't like the big city. So I moved back to a small town, Phoenix.

Now waitaminute, I don't mean that Phoenix had a tiny population in 1989, but it sure wasn't LA. And the attitudes of a big city versus a small town were obvious. The first thing that struck me was that there could be one big event in Phoenix that everyone knew about, and everyone was talking about. It's still true. That's not true in LA, and it wasn't even true back in the '80s, when I lived there. You couldn't say "How about the big game last night?" or "Did you go to the big concert?" in LA, there were too many things going on at the same time.

When Los Angeles was still fairly small, in the 1940s, the writer Raymond Chandler described it as a place that you could "get your arms around", and that's how Phoenix has always felt to me, from when I first arrived in 1977 to this very day.

Oh yeah, and for those of you scoffing at how big and complicated I thought Los Angeles was, I know, I've heard about Toyko, and places like that. All I can say is my little head would blow up if I tried to live there. At least in Los Angeles I could speak the language - most of the time, which was partly English and partly Spanish. There were many other languages, of course, but I got by all right.

A disadvantage of living in a small town is that there are much fewer employment opportunities, and they're all interconnected. I was in the banking industry in Phoenix, and believe me if I had made a mistake, I would have never been able to work in that town again. Well, that industry. In Los Angeles everything shuffled around so much that unless you were a big movie star in Hollywood, nothing mattered, you could always find work.

I don't want to go on and on, but in Los Angeles I was used to being able to buy anything, immediately. Even for my obscure foreign car. But in Phoenix, parts had to shipped in from, you guessed it, Los Angeles. And you could find any type of food, any type of restaurant, from anything to anything. In Phoenix I went to a Chinese restaurant, that served what they claimed to be Chinese food, and I had to let it go. I'm really not that fussy, anyway.

The advantages far outweighed the disadvantages, and when I visit my California friends I'm careful not to talk too much. But the parking is so great! And did I mention how great the parking is? I could go on and on, and I will, by writing more love letters to Phoenix here in my blog. I can get my arms around her.

L.A. proved too much for the man,
So he's leaving a life he's come to know.
He said he's going back to find,
What's left of his world.
The world he left behind not so long ago.

Image at the top of this post: Billboard from 1987, Phoenix, Arizona.

Thank you for the encouragement! If you want to see daily pics of my adventures on my recumbent trike in suburban Phoenix (just for fun, of course!) you can follow me on Buy me a coffee, and you can buy me a coffee if you'd like to:

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