As of August 15,
I have lived at the same address in Chicago for ten years. That is the longest
I have ever lived at any one address.
I never intended
to be so mobile. A quick check online and I see that the average person in the
United States is expected to move 11.4 times in his or her lifetime. My number
of moves is 29. It’s not a competition, but for someone who hasn’t spent
decades in the military, I seemed to have moved a lot. I’ve lived in five
states and the District of Columbia. I’ve lived in 13 different cities (see the
red stars on the map), multiple locations in most. I wasn’t sure how to count
my time on the USS Galveston, but
decided it was one location, even though I traveled all over the world on the
ship. And there were the odd weeks when I moved back with my parents, usually
while in transition; for example, I lived with them a couple of weeks while
awaiting my trip to boot camp in San Diego. I didn’t count these short stays as
part of the 29.
So why so many
moves? A few were for very good reasons: I moved near my mother in her final
years, for example. Some were for love and romance: I first moved to Dallas to be
with my partner, Don; we lived in seven homes in our seven years together. Don
loved remodeling and reselling houses. Most of my moves were simple
restlessness. Until my final teaching post before retirement, I never stayed
more than five years in a job: new job, new location. Most led to interesting
experiences, a few to one minor disaster or another (I loved San Diego, but it
was a financial disaster for me).
I’ve tried to
think what might have made me so restless. Perhaps it was all that reading I
did as a kid, from such soul-inspiring book as Two Years Before the Mast to more than a few books of SF and
fantasy—escape literature, after all. Maybe that led to my constant escape from
wherever I was. Maybe it was always the search for something better, even if
ill conceived: I wanted something better, even if I didn’t always use good
sense in the endeavor.
Now, I’ve been
settled for ten years, and I don’t seem to miss the moving. Of course old age
has something to do with it: I’m no longer able to fill up a van with boxes of
books and head out. I have finally come home to roost, it seems. I’m okay with
that.
