A Mobile Life

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.