December 29, 1977 was our first wedding anniversary. Kris and I got married one year earlier in Ted DeGrazia’s hand-built chapel near North Swan Road, with his permission.
We visited Kris’ Mother and Step-Father in Chico, California for the 1977 holidays. Kris was a high school teacher and I had just completed my first semester of law school, so we had ample time off. But it was time to return and we had breakfast in Chico before heading to I-5 southbound for our two-day drive back to Tucson.
We detoured to San Francisco and enjoyed lunch in the Mission District. Afterward, we departed for Los Angeles. We approached the city in the early evening and I saw the turnoff for Westwood. I then remembered the University of Arizona Men’s basketball team was scheduled to play mighty UCLA in Pauley Pavilion that evening. So, we decided to venture into Westwood, locate Pauley Pavilion, and see if there were tickets available.
We had breakfast in northern California, lunch in San Francisco, and took in a basketball game in Westwood on the same day. Did I mention that we were still in our twenties?
The Arizona basketball team was coached by the charismatic Fred Snowden, who brought an exciting brand of basketball to the U of A the season McKale Center opened. Arizona was still in the Western Athletic Conference. UCLA, coached by Gene Bartow, was a dominant force in the mighty PAC-8.
We easily found Pauley Pavilion and parked in a nearby parking garage. We had no tickets and the box office was sold out. Then Kris commented, “Look. There’s a scalper.” I looked and replied, “That’s not a scalper. That’s George Kalil!” Kalil, whose family owned the Kalil Bottling Company, was a huge U of A fan, in both senses of the word. A big man with a big heart, he was holding game tickets in the air. We walked up and I said, “George, Mike and Kris Tully from Tucson. Do you have any tickets?” He sold them to us at cost. As I said, George was not a scalper. His purpose was not to make money on tickets, but to have them available for vagabond fans like Kris and I, who dropped in spontaneously on the evening of our first anniversary. George Kalil was that kind of guy.
The Wildcats lost 85-63. We were not yet a match for the mighty Bruins. Years later, the teams are equals and rivals and Kris and I celebrate every win against UCLA with a particular vengeance. They dampened our first anniversary celebration, the bastards!
That was the only U of A basketball game we took in on our anniversary until last month. Our daughter, Meg, purchased tickets for the U of A Women’s team’s game against ASU. Unlike in Pauley Pavilion 45 years earlier, Arizona won easily.
Wedding anniversaries are life markers. Some celebrate a continuing love affair and some a truce, but they’re all significant. Our first anniversary was a raucous day that included a drive from Chico, California to Los Angeles, with lunch in San Francisco and a college basketball game along the way.
We returned to our small, two-bedroom house on what used to North Maddux Avenue. It was an unpaved stretch between Limberlost and Wetmore. So much changed during those 45 years.
Maddux Avenue became an extension of Stone Avenue. The large empty property north of Wetmore saw the construction of the Tucson Mall. That construction probably saved our home, because 100 million tons of soil were moved onto the site to construct a base for the new mall. That took us out of the flood plain before the Great Flood of 1983 that would surely have swamped our little house.
After the game last week against ASU, we returned to a different home. We replaced our boxy little house with a home in the foothills that’s just a few blocks from the chapel we were married in. We were not yet parents in 1977. In 2023, we have a two-year old grandchild. In 1977, we shared our household with cats. Shortly after moving to the foothills, where coyotes and owls reign, we became dog parents. Dog parents we have remained.
The world has changed as well, and not for the better. People were already warning about global climate change in the late 1970s. (Saturday Night Live had several skits based on the pending threat of global warming.) The world has gotten more crowded. The planet’s population was 4,229,506,060 in 1977. Today, there are more than eight billion, increasing by 200,000 a day. The 1977 figure will be doubled by the end of this decade. That growth, coupled with the effects of climate change, is creating a global migration that will destabilize governments – including our own – for decades.
I wish our generation was leaving a better world to my grandson and the other heirs of our greed and ignorance. Fortunately, Joey is too young to know about, much less worry about, the Earth’s pressing needs. He’ll learn all that eventually. He has to. But not yet.
He and I spent much of yesterday afternoon ignoring global warming, migration and immigration, Covid-19, the war in Ukraine, domestic political upheaval and so on. We escaped to our happy place.
We played basketball.
© 2023 by Mike Tully
Seriously, Siri?
How To Cope When the Little Girl In Your Phone Grows Up
Kris and I don’t knock ourselves out for the holidays anymore. That was especially the case this year when the kids and grandkid traveled to the east coast to spend them with Joey’s other grandparents. We had a pre-Christmas gifting before they left town, then settled in for a quiet week. We put up some outdoor lights because they’re festive. No tree, though. We haven’t done a tree in years. Christmas dinner featured “ugly steaks” from Dickman’s Deli. We’re both hard to buy for because we don’t need all that much, so we decided to gift each other a new iPhone.
We were due. We were still using iPhone 8 Pluses, which are virtually Jurassic in the light-speed evolution of modern digital devices. We upgraded to iPhone 14s. They come with 5G capability. I have no idea what that means, but I know the 5G rollout required a sprinkling of ugly, stubby towers throughout town. Is 5G worth polluting the landscape? Hope so. I have no idea what it does.
The new phone is larger, heavier and more durable than its ancestors. I got a gold one with a clear case, an iPhone with bling. While the camera on my old phone took adequate photos, the newest generation is a major upgrade. I’m still learning what it can do. My favorite improvement is the battery environment. Not only does the battery last substantially longer than my previous phone, but the charging process is surprisingly faster.
But then, about Siri.
Siri, on my previous phone, had a Sally-Fields-as-Gidget kind of perkiness that I found charming. Whether she was cueing up something from Apple Music or turning a device on or off, she was always bright and upbeat. “The deck lights are on!” she’d declare proudly, as though she had just won an award for it. Siri was so sweet.
But the new Siri is … different.
She sounds older. She sounds jaded. She sounds like my previous Siri after five years of gin and cigarettes. What happened to Siri between generations 8 and 14? Did she suffer an ugly breakup? Did she fall in with the wrong crowd? Is she trying to sound more like Alexa?
Perhaps an aging Siri echoes the iPhone’s maturing process. Maybe, as model 8 becomes X, as X becomes 11, 12, 13, Siri ages with each generation. At this rate, the Siri in iPhone model 20 will sound like a cross between Selma Diamond and the older, post “I Love Lucy” Lucy.
I had to change the way Siri sounded. I thought her more mature delivery would make sense if seasoned with an English accent. I imagined a Siri with the media-friendly, urbane lilt of the BBC’s Katty Kay. Or maybe the crisp, yet sexy authority of Diana Rigg from her “Mrs. Peel” days on TV’s “The Avengers.” A long-shot would have been a deeper, darker voice, like that of Charlotte Rampling.
Nope. Didn’t get Katty, Diana or Charlotte. The English-accented Siri has the delivery of a flight attendant. (“The deck lights are on! You may now move freely about the cabin.”) But it’s still an upgrade, so I stayed with the Brit.
Siri is not limited to American and English accents. There are also Australian, Indian, Irish and South African, but they sound pretty much alike. I expected a Crocodile Dundee sound from the Australian. No such luck. The Aussie accent is pretty watered down. My son-in-law’s father, an American who is originally from Australia, has the kind of voice Aussie Siri dreams of. And does the South African voice sound like, say, Trevor Noah? Nope. It barely has any accent at all. The Indian voices are not exactly Bollywood quality. They’re Gunga without the Din.
Why not an Italian accent? Or Irish? Or Scottish? All are more lyrical than the current choices.
Here’s another idea for the Siri voice options: regional accents. Why not have Southern Siris with a honey-dripping drawl? Or Bostonian Siris? How about Siri with an attitude? A Valley Girl Siri? A punk Siri? A rapper Siri? Okay, maybe not.
Or perhaps we should abandon any attempt to make Siri sound more human and relatable. Maybe the most honest approach to a robotic voice is to emulate HAL from the movie 2001. Pair HAL with a Cheech and Chong persona and Siri could simply talk to itself and not interact with us at all.
“Playing Moody Blues on Apple Music, Dave.”
“Dave ain’t here!”
© 2023 by Mike Tully
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