I mentioned it before, but one of the things that made the bowl trip to Birmingham so satisfying was that it was in a town where I had a past, where I had memories, where I had a life that could easily be related and relevant to the here-and-now. \u00a0And that\u2019s not a small consideration.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve mentioned the black hole before, I know, and how at diverse times it\u2019s felt as if my past is falling into it, with me one step ahead like Indiana Jones jumping crocodiles or crumbling cliffs. \u00a0I guess 2007 was the worst example – leaving Apple, being gone from DC, my surrogate big sister\u2019s moved out and the car I\u2019ve driven since Clinton was sworn in is no more and I don\u2019t have any friends from college or grad school and I\u2019ve barely heard from anyone at my high school in a decade or more, and there\u2019s the void yawning behind you. \u00a0And it\u2019s a lot harder to keep your balance with a void front and back.<\/p>\n
Part of it, I think, is just about having<\/em> a past. \u00a0Remember when that bar was something else, remember before Pancake Pantry had the apartments built next to it, remember when that was Alpine Bagel, remember when that restaurant was a dodgy clothing-and-Chinese-cellphone shop. \u00a0I was here before, I\u2019ve seen the change, I have institutional memory, I knew my way around and who knows, maybe I still do. \u00a0(hint: not as well as I thought I did.)<\/p>\n But part of it is about having that shared local culture. Mayfield Mall and the Old Mill. \u00a0Don and Mike and Low Budget Jeopardy and Vegas-style shows. KDF and HFS and 95 Rock. \u00a0People\u2019s Drugstore and Big B and Long\u2019s. \u00a0William Faulkner\u2019s famous like about the South was that \u201cthe past isn\u2019t dead, it isn\u2019t even past.\u201d \u00a0Which is true\u2026if you\u2019re there. \u00a0If you aren\u2019t, then your past is definitely in the past, because I have at best tangential contact with anyone who shares common memory of the life and times of my first 25 years.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what made it odd both times I made a big move – when I arrived in DC, it was almost fully-formed from scratch in 1997. \u00a0No past, no history, nobody around who could vouch for my prior existence – a big part of the reason why I was essentially rebuilt from scratch in the DMV. \u00a0And then, when I moved out here, nobody but my fiancee had any more than the faintest sense of my past existence, so I was dropped anew into a new world.<\/p>\n If I\u2019m honest, I really haven\u2019t done enough to build it. \u00a0Sure, I\u2019ve had Cal football tickets for a decade (even if we don\u2019t get very much use out of them lately), and I tried diversions as random as java programming lessons, Catholic RCIA and an a cappella<\/em> men\u2019s chorus – none of which really worked. \u00a0Work really hasn\u2019t been as conducive to things social as it was back East, for better or worse – there\u2019s no one tying me down to a crappy job, but there\u2019s nobody there making it better, either.<\/p>\n But the other part of it is just time. \u00a0Putting in the hours, and the days, and the years. \u00a0Doing enough things that you can point back later and say \u201cremember when\u201d. \u00a0And in about five months, I\u2019ll have a lot more to say about that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I mentioned it before, but one of the things that made the bowl trip to Birmingham so satisfying was that it was in a town where I had a past, where I had memories, where I had a life that could easily be related and relevant to the here-and-now. \u00a0And that\u2019s not a small consideration. … <\/p>\n