AS BRITISHERS SEE ARIZONA

BEING AN AMERICAN IS TO BE RICH IN MANY THINGS.

We three, parents and son, had become separated by a generation of years and customs. But our worlds, the one they had inherited in England and the one I adopted in America, were due to collide. So I waited on my side of our ocean and considered the comparisons.

In their England, to swipe at generalities, taxi drivers remain please-and-thank-you diplomats who will pick only the exact fare from a palm-load of offered change. Police officers walk unarmed and usually unharmed. Kids still swim in the Thames. Old school tie academe is unspotted by riot, and lawn party guests continue to sip tea from Dresden eggshells and inquire: "I say, isn't that the Duchess?"

In my United States, twice as many people are murdered in cities the size of Dallas each year as in all of Great Britain. We chase the dollar and catch inflation. Some claim we have elevated corruption to a science, adultery to an art. And at backyard barbecues, a man fills his fist with a Budweiser can and asks: "Who's da broad?"

English wives trade recipes, American husbands swap wives. America is affluent and at war. England is poorer, but, unless your mother comes from Ireland, at peace. Their national leaders are retired by votes or public opinion. Ours have been assassinated.

I knew too that newspapers in London's Fleet Street tend to import only the sensational and the idiotic from America. My parents would know of people like Spock, Manson, Leary and Newton; places like Watts, Kent State and Berkeley; and situations like Vietnam and the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Their prejudgments were bound to damn my country. I flinched in advance of their visit, even prepared a defence.

And I was an insecure, faithless fool for doing so. For my parents, both hardened by three score and more years in Britain's austere, monarchical mold, found their most memorable American experience to be America herself.

We motored 2,000 miles around the Southwest in an automobile that I consider routine but which they rode as a Rolls. We sniffed the best and the worst; from the upslope mansions of Beverly and Nob Hills to the downhill slums of Los Angeles and Phoenix.

But, remarked these staid two who worked decades for a car, a refrigerator and a television set, even the shacks have cars outside and television and refrigerators inside.

We saw Mammoth Lakes at Yosemite, still a silent Christmas card in early summer, where a room at a new ski lodge costs less than a bad British dinner. They thrilled at the tiny things Americans no longer notice; beer sold in drug stores, doggie bags, ice machines, room service and thermostats.

"Look at this, mother . . . matches in every ashtray," said father.

"Look at this, father . . . a heat lamp in the bathroom," said mother.

By Paul Dean

Las Vegas should have shattered them. I placed it early on our agenda so later memories would tend to subdue the earlier shocks. But it was the second fall for a fool.

They saw Las Vegas (dad would only pronounce it "Les Vargas") for what it is, brash, gaudy and tireless. But any distaste was drowned by the utter spectacle. No photographs have caught the spires of neon that turn midnight streets brighter than an equatorial midday. No words have been able to catch the sweating fervor that is almost tidal around casino tables. And no citizen will deny that this town has any pretenses beyond what you wish to pretend.

So they saw this, they felt it. They evaluated Las Vegas as a blatant, exciting pocket of America, take it or leave it, yet far from being all-American.

By contrast, they stood quiet, almost afraid before nature's talent that produced the purple Grand Canyon. They were entranced by what the genius of one man had built at Disneyland. And they were pleasantly annoyed by the plaster facades of Universal Studios and their realization that Ironside and the British Broadcasting Corporation only brought them a makebelieve America. "Did you hear that guide . . . all the doors on Western sets are built smaller so cowboy stars look bigger," was my father's indelible memory. "And they make sound effects for a fistfight by punching a ham . . . I don't think we'll eat sandwiches in their cafeteria," commented practical mother.

Three cameras humming and clicking (they feared their hometown Palmers Green & Southgate Gazette would not believe their claims) they roamed the massive color slide that is Arizona. A million saguaros were in bloom, the desert was wearing its perfume of early summer and the cliffs of Sedona shone copper-red in the twilight. They thought that lobster dinners on Santa Monica pier, cruisers on Lake Mead, swimming pool parties and an afternoon of lightplane sightseeing over Arizona were moments only for millionaires. Then a shoe salesman took us for that lobster dinner, a telephone repairman cranked up his cruiser, a police officer invited us to his pool party and a bug exterminator loaned us his airplane. Being an American, they were learning, is to be rich in many things. And then, after several dinners at the end of other days of rainbow memories, mother and father explored the little things of their love for America.

Dad admired breakfasts as large as lunch, towns that thank you for stopping, restaurants that ask visitors to come again, and waitresses who introduce themselves by name.

He complimented the system that gives its citizens the cars, highways, appliances, recreation areas and com-mercial conveniences they request rather than the mar-ginal facilities that the British are handed with reluctance.

"I see now why you came here," he said, answering a question that all my tissue air-mail letters and long dis-tance telephone messages of 15 Christmases past had never been able to answer.

"Our luxuries are your essentials," he said. "A young man in America has more than he could earn in England by a lifetime of work and saving.

"If I had it to do over again. . . ."

Mother was a little more housewifely.

She adores our neat, ranch-style homes in the Southwest with no two alike in a single block. Also one-stop supermarkets, no shopping baskets to hand carry to the stores, laundry and films in by 9 and out by 5, steaks half the price and twice the size of British beef and shelves stacked with farm produce that would win blue ribbons at any English vegetable show.

American women are remarkably well groomed, their children disciplined and polite, she decided. American men are better educated, friendlier in public, generous even in private and "why can't London's businessmen be allowed to work without stiff collars and heavy jackets?"

She didn't like dark restaurants, women who shop in rollers, the thought of open casket funerals and American tea. He didn't like television commercials, firetrucks that use sirens when the city is asleep and drive-in churches. And American tea.

But their positive critique continued. Great roads made for motoring, not meandering. Luxury is a motel room that remembers everything from rheostat lights to a bottle opener on the bathroom door. Extra cups of coffee at no extra charge. Lawn sprinklers. Friendly people who say: "There you go." No front yard fences. Push button telephones. Freedom.

Then mother had one question.

"Why, with all this in this land do so many Americans complain about their country?", she asked.

I couldn't answer her.

The Gila River Indian Community's Arts and Crafts Center on U.S. I-10

Located west of main highway between Phoenix and Tucson this new showcase for authentic Indian Arts and Crafts of the Southwest including baskets and ironwood carvings of Mexico's Seri Indians.

Owned and operated by the tribe, on the reservation, the two story complex includes a coffee shop and rest facilities in addition to the museum and sales room.

Manager Jerry Collins is a most knowledgeable young man who can be relied upon to assure the quality of the center's wares, which include some of the finest jewelry, art, and Indian rugs available anywhere, with the benefit of prices well below the "high rent district" shops. Large signs alert the motorists travelling north or south on U.S. Interstate 10. The impressive complex is well off the main highway, near Sacaton, and is open daily, including Sunday, from 9 till 5.

We heartily recommend this deserving enterprise.

"Nothing but the blue of heaven above you, and all around the wonderful silence of the desert. It is a marvelous country but you would never want to live here. But it is a good place to visit."

... so wrote a dear friend of Ernesto Peixotto, author of "The Hispanic Southwest," published in 1916 by Charles Scribner's Sons.

The writer was describing the part of Arizona located within a 25 mile radius of Phoenix, "The Valley Of The Sun," with a population of more than one million of the happiest, healthiest, and some of the wealthiest people in this great land.