Where I Live

As a kid, I had a hard time imagining life much beyond my surroundings. I took everything in my hometown for default, and though I’d muse about life as I’d seen it on TV or glimpsed it in thrice-a-year trips to New York City or far-more-occasional vacations to more far-flung places, at heart, I understood the world through the lens of a quiet neighborhood in a suburb of a small Upstate New York city.

I ventured a two-to-three-hour drive away for college, to an even smaller town, closer to a marginally bigger city. There, I caught a broader glimpse at what another life might look like, my life transported to a new setting, not least of all removed from the people who’d most shaped my sense of place those first eighteen years of my life. After college, my first move was to a city smack-dab in between the place I’d called home and the place where I went to college, a move equal parts because it’s where I first landed a job and because that job deposited me down the street from my girlfriend.

These shifts felt seismic, each opening a door to a new life in a way I suppose is only possible in a life as stable as mine was, living in the same house for all of those formative years, then coming back to it for holidays and spaces in between.

Then the bigger moves.

Seven years in Baltimore.

Two years in Oregon.

A year or so bopping around the Carolinas en route to two years in Georgia.

To Las Vegas.

The move to Las Vegas represented something aspirational on a few levels. Since my first adult trip there, over a decade before the move, I’d called it a favorite vacation spot and a place where I could imagine living, less for the neon lights of the strip than the access to them and in a climate where it didn’t snow. Combine that with the full-time college teaching job I’d longed for the preceding three years.

I had a daily commute again--a half hour or so drive when I listened to podcasts or music and daydreamed while I ate breakfast or an afternoon snack. Nothing objectively glamorous about it, except for the scenery.

The Las Vegas Strip, looming every time I near campus. The mountains and expanse of desert sand when I near my still-new home.

It’s easy for years to slip on by—a handful of milestones aside, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what was different between an average January day in my 2010 or my 2013, those years I lived in the same apartment, commuted the same roads in the same car to the same office job. It’s only the small handful of times I’ve revisited those spaces that I’ve taken it all in--the ugly super market parking lot that offered a surprisingly stunning view of sunsets over the city. The peaceful calm of the long corridor between the parking garage and the offices. The big conference room where I sat through long, hard meetings, but often as not among people who were some of my closest friends in that period of my life. Not to be confused with the smaller conference with the glass top where everyone always left fingerprints of moisture behind, and everyone agreed it was gross.

There was the Chinese restaurant where I watched a boy grow from elementary school age to early high school, all the while compelled to work the cash register between working through math textbooks.

The last time I visited, that restaurant had shut down.

It’s easy to take these things for granted when life is busy, and the longer you’re in a place.

While I don't have any plans for leaving, I also don’t know how long I’ll live in Las Vegas--there are too many factors to say anything with certainty and I’ve learned a dozen times over now not to assume that a likely path is a sure one--that a universe of possibilities will often as not overwhelm what someone as simple-minded as me could guess will be in a year or five or ten.

So I’ve taken to reminding myself of the good, not only in life with my wife and son, not only in a job enjoy with some of the best students I’ve had, not only in degrees of success in my writing that I once dreamed of.

In this place.

On drives home, there’s a sleepy stretch from the major road into our neighborhood. Mountains ahead. The Las Vegas Strip tiny, by way of perspective, out the driver’s side window.

I inhale.

I exhale.

I take a moment to experience and to remember that this where I am.