Linger Longer

Right as I was being born, my parents were in the process of moving from one town to another. My dad finished moving the last of the furniture some time after I was born, as my mom was recovering.

Here I am, deep in polymathic thought, studying the intersection of biology, physics, and urban living all at once (my parents insisted that I was not allowed to go into the road when they first showed me this picture):

From there, we moved to Columbia, the capitol of the state, so my mom could get her master’s degree—or maybe it was my dad (both ended up getting their master’s). My parents had established a foothold at Married Student Housing, a university-sponsored program that helped newlyweds and young married couples by renting affordable units out to them.

I made some new friends and explored my surroundings a bit.

From here, we moved once more, and I made a few more friends, but we were only in this house for about a year before we headed to the neighborhood where I would spend the next five years. Here, I would have adventure after adventure:

We could play in the streets with little worry of traffic, and it was a somewhat idealized suburban location in many ways. It felt safe to play, and there were plenty of kids my age.

Five years was a long time, but the next move was almost inevitable. My parents badly wanted to own a home, and they had been renting in the last few neighborhoods while finishing college and looking for a good place to settle down. This final home would be the destination for my family, where my folks still live today.

They bought an empty lot in 1986, and I began trying to figure out ways we could stay in Candlewood. I wasn’t interested in upending the first place where I felt I really had roots, so I asked if maybe we could buy this house from the landlord instead. No dice, but maybe you can see where my eleven year old brain was heading once it had a little more time to develop.

Desperately trying to hang onto Candlewood

Alas, this final move from my youth happened. I met new friends and had even more adventures, including all of high school. This new ‘hood was close enough so that I could ride my bike over a dirt road that connected the two areas, and the journey might take an hour or two. It wasn’t close, but I felt tethered to Candlewood.

I would ride bikes with Tim and we would play D&D with friends on the other side, or maybe I’d make a solo trip to visit a handful of friends in a coordinated get-together. Necessity is the mother of invention, and I think I figured out how to navigate through a lot during this phase.

I lived with my folks in Briarcliffe until I had been 18 for a few months. This seems shockingly young in retrospect, but it may help to keep in mind that I was driving the day I turned fifteen. Independence was everything for me, so off I went.

Jay and I lived in our apartment for exactly one year, and then we both got wanderlust and moved to Richmond. There’s a great deal I’m glossing over here, but I promise to tell you all about 1994 soon (spoiler: I even have some writing I did from the late 90s about my time living in this place).

Once in Richmond, I bounced around the city like a ping-pong ball. Besides living in three different places that first year I was in the city, I moved around ten times more before finally buying my first house in 2009. We moved from that house to be closer to Revolution BJJ in 2018, and the rest brings us up to the present.

This is a lot of moving around for one person, isn’t it? Having tried out 20 or 30 different spots for months at a time, I have a pretty good idea of what I want in a home, and there’s honestly not very much to it. And, after driving to the moon (metaphorically), I was tired of sleeping in a different place every night—the road trip life had played its course in my life.

Hence, lingering longer in one physical spot. Much, much longer, I hope.

Many of the journeys I take are mental these days. I love to learn something new every day, and I somehow get to take many of you with me regularly. Still, there are international journeys in my future, and I want to be sure to bring you with me for those, too.

These trips (hopefully) will be carefully crafted and loaded with history and culture, not out of necessity like most of my previous life’s traveling.