“Hey little Wildcat fan.”
Fifteen years later, those words still echo in my mind. They bring me back to when I was a 10 year old living in Southern California, searching for an identity after moving away from Tucson months earlier.
When my parents packed my brother and I into our Honda Odyssey and headed down I-8 for a new life, I had thought it was best to leave most of my connections with Tucson at the California border.
My new friends wouldn’t care much that I’d grown up in their arid neighboring state. They’d think I was strange for preferring to ride bikes in the desert than skateboard along the beach.