Assuming you don’t live where you grew up, what combination of chance, luck, and planning led you to live where you do?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Well, what an interesting question. Let’s see, how far back do we want to go…
I was in a combined graduate program at Harvard/MIT when I concluded that the faculty did not have the expertise to teach me what I needed to solve the problem that I had set for myself, so I transferred to Montana State to work with a specific professor. He then arranged a position in Norway with the founder of our field, where I resolved everything to my satisfaction. This opened the door to a staff position at a national laboratory in New England that no one has ever heard of – and we kind of like it that way, so pardon my caginess about where precisely I am now. Sometimes I wonder what might have been had I stayed on with the old crowd, a number of whom now have Nobel Prizes, but I really do think that I am happier being good at what I love to do rather than being a celebrity.
Sounds like a Will Cuppy story, don’t it?
It was a bit of all 3 – job played a large role in moving.
Pure chance. A recruiter with a job to fill in a city 500 miles from where I was born that I had never visited even once.
I live in Nashville which is the capital of Tennessee. I grew up in Chattanooga. When I was a kid, my aunt took us on a tour of the Big City state capital (Nashville was less than half the size it is now,) and I loved it. We saw the Hermitage and Fort Nashborough (a recreation of the first white settlement,) the Parthenon and the capitol. I thought at the time, that’s where I want to live when I grow up.
Six years later my family moved to Connecticut, but two years after that I came back to Tennessee, to Nashville, to college. Met and married a Nashville native. I remembered raking leaves in our front yard one beautiful day and thinking, I’m really happy here. I think I’m as happy here as I could be anywhere. The marriage didn’t last, but I’m still as happy in Nashville as I could be anywhere.
Frankly, though, I don’t think a place makes you happy. That’s something you carry with you no matter where you move.
Moved to Philly with a band, the band broke, up and moved on, I stayed.
Disability, we had to escape New England winters. Snow and wheelchairs are a terrible combination. We were laying in bed watching the curtains blow around in a February storm after a particularly snowy winter. I looked at the future Mrs X. and said, “let’s move to Florida”, without hesitation she said, “yes”. That was almost 25 yrs ago. Considered Cali but it has it’s drawbacks and I’ve got family here so that made it that much easier.
At first, it was chance. I joined a cult while at a university in my native California back in the late 90s. While I was an active member, a sort of recruitment letter came from Madison, Wisconsin and I decided to check it out. So I moved to Madison as a missionary. (If you ever visited Willie Street in Madison between 1997 and 2000, you might know the bookstore where I was hanging out).
In 2000, I was basically done with religion, but I decided that I liked the upper-Midwest, so I did my PhD in the Twin Cities. After that, my job could have been anywhere (or even better, nowhere seeing as I finished in 2009), but I got hired into the University of Wisconsin System, probably because they at least knew I could handle the weather. So I don’t think it’s chance that I ended up staying in the upper-Midwest.
I was shipped off against my will to a New England boarding school. A decade later – as a floundering graduate student in LA – I went to my 10th grade roommate’s wedding, where I met the Head of the school he worked at. A year later, I was working at that school in New Jersey. I then bumped into my old wrestling coach at the Prep Nationals, who suggested I apply to work at my own school, as they were losing three history teachers – including himself.
I have therefore accidentally become a teacher and accidentally wound up at the same school that turned my life around 30 years ago. No plan.
What do you mean, “grew up”?
Growing up in Central New York and having driven through Pennsylvania on several occasions, I swore that I would never live in PA. After graduating from Syracuse during Bush’s first recession I knew that I had to go where the work was and was recruited to come to the Philly area.
After 10 years, I honestly couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
I went from MO to MS because I threw a dart at a folded map on where to go to college. I was the first person in 120 years to be academically separated from Ole Miss. It was sad. Ole Miss is where you go when you flunk out of Alabama or Arkansas.
I was discharged from the Marines in DC. I got drunk one night and decided I wanted to see Tucumcari, NM so I bought a Trailways ticket to Berkeley (it went thru Tucumcari).
I met my wife at the student union in Berkely. She was teaching Mathematics, I was working in a steel mill.
I’ve been following her for over 40 years now. SF, Minneapolis, Houston, Birmingham, Mass.
A long, strange trip, indeed.
Almost all of my moves were because of jobs (hires, switching jobs, transfers)–so chance and luck. The move in 1979 from GA to NC was because we thought our job chances were better in the Triangle market than in the Atlanta market. After then it was job switches and transfers. When we got here, we were looking for a rental house just to settle in while we scouted a house to own. We had moved so frequently that we were still renters at age 49. The neighborhood we moved into was so congenial that we moved to another rental two doors down and then bought a unit in a condo townhouse community around the corner. Declining job mobility in the US economy kept us here until retirement, and we’re still here.
I live where I grew up. I was lucky that my parents had me traveling all across the country when I was growing up. There were only a few places in America where I could see myself living if not my hometown. I applied for jobs there, and didn’t get them, so I took the job in my hometown.
In 2005 I had free choice of where to live with only a few constraints: for job travel it had to be within 2 hours of a major airport and had to be in a country where we had significant customer-related work. At the time that meant US, Canada, many countries in Latin America, much of Western Europe, Australia, and South Africa. But for personal reasons we wanted our kids to be near their paternal grandparents who lived in the Chicago area. After trying very hard to deal with Chicago, where I was born, we determined that the nearest “very nice” area, in terms of climate, nature, etc., was 1000 miles away in Colorado. Sorry, Michigan, etc., just do not compare. We tried hard also to talk ourselves into Ontario or Quebec – this being 2005 and the dark days of the Bush era – but as much as we love Quebec in summer we just couldn’t deal with the climate.
As for the exact location (in the vicinity of Colorado Springs), well my wife fell in love with it, the schools rated highly, lots and lots of access to activities for the kids, and very low cost of living (probably the best cost-of-living/desirability-of-location ratio in the US). We wouldn’t choose this again, as I’ve written here before. In 2005 in the Bush era the full reality of living in a place where 75% of the folks would later vote against Obama and where a very large minority is retired military officers wasn’t something we noticed much, but in the Obama era it’s something that can’t be ignored. We’re sticking it out, with a small group of friends who quietly think the rest are fucking nuts and hoping for better days, but if we had to do it again we might consider another place in Colorado. And given that the main reason for staying “close” (relatively speaking” to Chicago is now, sadly, moot we’d probably do Oregon – Ashland or Bend or maybe even Eugene – as the politics are far more palatable.
I grew up in New Mexico then came to Colorado for college. I lived in NYC briefly then returned to CO as soon as I could. Have never looked back. (Too busy taking in the mountains and incredible skies.)
I live where I grew up, but the reason that I live here is related to how my dad moved here.
My grandfather had a construction business and things were very slow during the depression in my dad’s hometown.
His brother-in-law was a reporter for a small local paper which was owned by a company that had a group of local papers.
He put my grandfather on the subscription list and through reading them, they discovered that there was more business activity going on here (about 60 miles away, and closer to NYC). They did some building here and after the war, my dad came back and was building 3 houses.
On the next block was a development of 2 family houses which had been put up during the war with the agreement that they would be rental units. Now that the war was over they were being sold and he figured that he couldn’t build one for what they were selling them for.
So he bought one and that’s how I ended up living where I do.
“I joined a cult” definitely wins the comments.
If your parent was an Air Force Brat who lived in half a dozen different countries growing up, moving around was just what you did. So, born in Alabama, to NC, KY, WI, MA then went to college in Philly. But, I”m not a restless person by disposition, and Philly’s got everything a discerning individual could ever require, so here I am still, almost 30 years later. I did move to the burbs after 25 years though. Kids’ll do that.
I grew up in various places, but primarily on a 40 acre farm in the Berkshires.
Bounced around through every New England state but RI, plus Wisconsin and Maryland. Got into computer programming, hated COBOL, and went looking for something with a little more mathematical heft. The non-military FORTRAN shops were in and around Boston, so I peddled my chops there, and landed a job with an environmental engineering company. I helped them launch their AI unit, and that gave me a combination of experience in C++ (not yet a common thing) and LISP. Which was my entry into working at MIT on software fir astronomy satellites. A dream job, if not the one I dreamed of as a biology-besotted undergraduate.
And now I’m planning on retiring within two years. My wife and I bought that same 40 acre farm from my favorite aunt, and built ourselves a supremely energy efficient house there that we expect will be net zero. To finance it, we’ll have to sell our city house in Cambridge, and I will revert to the existence of the truly rural.
So now I feel a little like Finnegans Wake – ending my story of Doublends Jined in the middle of the same sentence that started it.