Places I've Lived and Why I Left

This isn't an entirely negative post, but the title is catchier than “Good and Bad Things About Places I've Lived.” Why would anyone but me be interested in such a list, I asked myself. Well, maybe because you've lived there, too. Maybe you'd thank me for taking you back down memory lane (or else curse me for dragging you kicking and screaming to places you'd just as soon forget). Some of these recollections have little to do with the places themselves, but maybe my memories will strike something personal in your own life. (I've tried to limit each location to one good thing and one bad, not always successfully.) Anyway, the past is a nice place to visit, but only that. For me, part of growing up meant learning to accept the fact that nothing lasts and everything changes. As the title of Simone Signoret's autobiography says, “Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.”

North Bergen, New Jersey (1953-1958)

Good: My family – mother, father, me, and, for the last eight months, my new baby sister – lived upstairs in a modest, three-family, red brick house. My parents were close friends with the landlords, and my first friend in the world was their daughter Gail, who is still my friend today. Just inside the front door was a small vestibule, very small. It was ringed with stained glass on the tops of the walls and in the front door. I used to sit on the tile floor and feel the sun come through in the morning and wash all those colors over me. The neighbors got used to stepping over me. That little space became primal, a touchstone without which I would be adrift in the world. But I'll have to get used to that, as not only am I nearly 3,000 miles away, but the building was sold last year.

Bad: The kindergarten teacher who made me stand behind a piano and recite the Pledge of Allegiance because, as I'd heard my father say, I asked her if I could “take a leak.” I never made the connection.

Miami/Miami Beach, Florida (1958-1971, 1975-1977)

Good: My second-grade teacher took the class on a field trip to the Museum of Natural History. When we got back to the classroom, everyone had to write a short essay about the experience. Instead of a grade, she gave me a nickel. My first paying job as a writer!

Bad: Humidity. Palmetto bugs – picture oversized cockroaches that can fly – yikes!! I still try not to.

Pensacola, Florida (1971-1975)

Good: (1) The extraordinary white sands along Pensacola Beach. (2) The downstairs apartment I shared offbase with two other Navy pals. It was on a quiet street in an almost idyllic neighborhood, just one other apartment upstairs. Two bedrooms, furnished, $125/mo. I drove there more than a decade later to revisit the place, and the new downstairs tenant was surly and suspicious until I convinced him I really had lived there. I understood his hostility years later, when I could do research on the Internet – at some point between '74 and '85, it had been a crack house.

Bad: The racism of a small city in the Deep South (at the time, anyway). We were generally immune to it on our naval air station. But one Saturday night our black race relations counselor went to a bar on the outskirts of the city with a white enlisted woman and one other couple, both white. They hadn't been sitting at their table for very long when this white redneck at the bar walked up to him and said, “You got more nerve than Jesse James.” In the chaos that followed, the other guy and his date managed to get to their car with the other woman and take off, which I understood, as they were all in real danger. My black friend was beaten and badly outnumbered but somehow managed to get away, with a bunch of goons behind him. He ran for miles until he reached the base in the dead of night. He resigned from his race relations position the next day, and the bar was immediately put off limits to all personnel.

New Jersey/New York City (1977-1981)

Good: (1) Discovering that the apartment building with the vestibule has a vacancy, and the landlords are the same folks my family had known before. Reading poems aloud in Greenwich Village hangouts and church basements around the city, trying to get my name known.

Bad: It was the late '70s. One word: disco.

Wichita, Kansas (1981-1992)

Good: (1) One of my college students, Gino Salerno, used his chainsaw to make beautiful sculptures out of dead tree trunks. A popular attraction throughout the city's parks, until after a few years when vandals started to notice them. (2) Knowing I could drive 15 minutes out of the city in any direction and be in the middle of practically nowhere.

Bad: Tornadoes, of course. You never forget the way the clouds turn a kind of turquoise and start roiling around overhead. The Andover Tornado killed 23 residents of a trailer park that basically wasn't there anymore. I joined Mennonite Disaster Relief in trying to salvage whatever we could for the survivors. Oh, and don't underestimate the hail. One summer, a tornado heading straight for Wichita from the nearby city of Hutchinson turned into a hailstorm en route and cost the city three-quarters of a billion dollars. Sounds incredible, but that was the stat I heard. For the rest of the summer, you could find residents on any given block working on their roofs. Auto glass repair businesses were booked up for months.

 

 

Seattle, Washington (Eastside) (1992-2006)

Good: (1) The Olympics to the west, the Cascade Range to the east, Mount Rainier looming just to the south (on a clear day we'd say “the mountain is out”) – like living in an IMAX nature documentary. (2) Safeco Field, beautiful home of the Mariners! (I was there during the Ken Griffey Jr. and the Ichiro years. Around that time, Alex Rodriguez left Seattle for Texas and a bigger paycheck. When he returned to Seattle for the first time and stepped up to home plate, people threw Monopoly money from the stands.)

Bad: Traffic and the occasional earthquake.

New Gloucester, Maine (2006-2011)

Good: Remote rural community.

Bad: Remote rural community.

Boise, Idaho (2011-present)

Good: (1) Unbelievably friendly people here. Smile at strangers and they might tell you the story of their lives. (2) Skiing, hunting, fishing, camping – it's hard to find friends in town between May and October.

Bad: No hurricanes or tornadoes, but every now and then a stray mountain lion will mosey into town from the foothills.