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Each issue we link up with Rachel Miller’s Love Letters to Tucson blog for a letter from a Tucson inhabitant about why they love this fair city. This month: for Peter Norback, Tucson’s sunshine brought more than just physical warmth. Photos by Rachel Miller
Dear Tucson,
Buddy Hackett, the comedian, once said that when he moved out of his mother’s house and away from her cooking he suddenly thought he was dying because “the fire in his chest was going out.”
Something similar happened to me when I moved to Tucson from Princeton, NJ 19 years ago. Over an 18-month period I began not to feel things in my hands and my knees and my shoulders. I thought I was slowly losing all sensation in my body when I realized, ‘Hey, my arthritis is going away.’
Other things started to happen, too, like music sounded much better once my teeth stopped chattering. For 53 years I was cold for a good part of the year. I often wore coats over my coats… it was that bad for me. Then Merrill Lynch, where I worked, started to change from an investment brokerage to a bank, which they failed at in the worst possible way. I saw that coming so I left several years before the end.
The only thing I wanted in my life at the time was sunshine. So I just packed up and moved to Tucson. Turns out that was all I ever needed anyway. I’m healthier, which makes me happier, as does my work to help feed the hungry.
New York City was a cold reality on many levels for me. It was the best place to build my author and marketing careers. But the worst place to enjoy the outdoors for any extended period of time.
The biggest compliment I can pay Tucson is to say I am no longer cold. And that is what I love the most.
love,
Peter
We don’t need the Movoto Real Estate folks to tell us that Tucson is among the nation’s most caring cities. We see it daily, and beautifully, in Ben’s Bells, the Diaper Bank of Southern Arizona, and in the simplicity of Peter Norback’s One Can a Week Food Donation Program, among other fine Tucson examples.
Rachel met Peter initially at Sprouts Farmers Market on Speedway where he was soliciting donations for the program, and then joined him in the Miles neighborhood where he started the program. Contact him if your neighborhood or school or business would like to participate in or sponsor the One Can a Week program. Peter Norback can be contacted at (520) 248-3694 or at [email protected]
