A letter to old friends
Bill Plapp

As I understand the assignment, relate my past to Tucson and the chapel. Moral: Do this immediately after class. Don't wait until the night before the next class. By that time it's hard to remember what was happening.

Dear Clint and Judy:

Three years now in Tucson. For us it's a welcome relief from Texas and College Station. Tucson may be a much bigger city, but its easier to take--more laid back, more tolerant, and many, many more opportunities to try things then in Texas. Here we are not suffocated by a morality we found highly offensive there.

With this note I enclose a schedule of spring training major league baseball games. If you can tear yourselves away from the Aggies for a few days, we'd love to have you join us and determine once again if baseball can really be played in the desert.

In our new neighborhood, there's a community center, old San Pedro Chapel. It's a former church for what used to be a Mexican-American farming community on the outskirts of Tucson. The farmers are gone and the community is now largely Anglo, urban, and only slightly Mexican. And so the former church has a religious function no longer. It was replaced by a new parish a few miles away and in a different, less rural, less Mexican, neighborhood.

The old chapel is a lovely building. The exterior is sort of a sand-colored stucco. Severe and serene. No ornamentation except for a small bell tower and a couple of grotto-like setbacks on the front of the building. The building now belongs to a neighborhood association. Tucson is good at that-working on the formation of neighborhood groups to represent different populations to the city. Not at all like Texas where power is jealously guarded by those who have it and never willingly shared.

But the chapel strikes memories. It serves the neighborhood as the Unitarian fellowship building served a community of outsiders in College Station. Here in Tucson, outsiders are more tolerated and even welcomed. In other words, the chapel here is less a refuge than the chapel-like building in College Station.

So, we enjoy activities at the chapel. But the need for it and the desire to keep it functioning are less pressing to us than were the needs to keep the chapel functioning in College Station.

Strange, isn't it, how time and place can change and with them, values that need acting on in the community?

Best wishes, Bill

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