Travel Eludes Us/Finding Home
Another long weekend, and my boss is off to the Bahamas. She was just in Hawaii over Christmas. Man oh man. It makes me so wish I had money. And yes, I just don’t. I have in mind that I must get to Paris soon. I found really great prices on tickets for April, when my boss is taking a week off, but I don’t think it’s going to fly. It’s just too hard when you’re new to a city. I’m earning a post-doc salary, and Aaron is in a new environment with few local contacts.
It makes me jealous of people who have spent their lives in one place. There is a familiarity and a stability about that which I’ve not really had. While I don’t feel like I’ve moved a lot in my life, I’ve moved a whole lot more than most people I’ve met.
- 1969-1971 – Memphis, TN
- 1971-1974 – Lidgate, Suffolk, England
- 1974-1987 – Atlanta, GA
- September 1987 – January 1988 – Athens, GA
- February 1988 – May 1992 – Oberlin, OH (one summer in Athens, GA; one in Atlanta, GA; one in Urbania, Italy; and one in Lenox, MA)
- Summer 1992 – Chautauqua, NY
- September 1992 – August 1993 – Boston, MA
- 1993-1997 – Atlanta, GA
- 1997-2004 – Bloomington, IN
- 2004-2005 – Memphis, TN
- 2005 – Back to Boston, hopefully for a while
I want to feel that I am part of a community again. I had that in Bloomington, but it took a while. I hope this is where I end up staying for a while. Perhaps it’s why finding the right place in Boston feels so important to me these days.
Comment by Trisha
January 15, 2006 @ 1:53 am
I for one HAVE lived in one place my whole life… in some ways I still don’t feel like I’m in a community. Probably because so many friends have moved away, married, had kids, or moved on or whatever.
Though the first time you lived in Memphis, you moved away a year before I arrived, so to speak. I didn’t make my grand entrance until August 1972. Sadly, the hospital where it happened is now a parking lot. See what I mean about lack of community somehow?