(nostalgic)

On Monday, a friend of mine moved from San Francisco to Boston. As I’ve spent my 2+ years in San Fran marveling over the number of people I know from Boston who have re-settled here, it seemed quite novel that someone was following that path in the other direction. And I was tickled by just how much this excited me. This friend will be going to grad school at MIT, so her life will revolve around Cambridge, a town that feels just as much like home to me as Atlanta does. It, too, is where I grew up, in a sense—not in childhood, but into adulthood.

For ten years, my life took place there; experiences that shaped my sense of self unfolded there. Some things about me might never have formed quite like they have if not for the life I led there. I say that about things I am glad for and things I am not; life will be a mixed bag wherever you lead it. But for a very long time (except, each year, toward the end of winter), I sure did love that being the setting for my life. For a long time, I thought I could never like anywhere quite as much.

I went to the bookstore to get this friend a guide book to Boston, and I found myself reading all of it, making mental notes of restaurants or museums it had overlooked, recalling the best time of year to go to this place or the best dish to order at that one. I stood in the bookstore and took a serious walk down memory lane, seeing the past through Walden-Pond-on-a-summer-day-filled glasses. I did get restless living in the same place so long, but I have an awful lot of good moments there to remember.

The best one, perhaps, was the last one.

It was an October morning. I had slept on an air mattress in my otherwise emptied bedroom; Amy had slept on the futon in the living room. We got up at 6, on schedule, and packed the last few bags into the car. We ate breakfast; we agreed on six starting CDs for the player; we hugged my roommate goodbye.

Before we could drive away, confetti filled the windshield. My landlords leaned over their rickety front-porch railing and waved, dribbling white paper dots from their fingers. It was a joyful send-off with only a few tears shed as I drove through streets I would know even blind and to a highway I had traveled many times. But this time I would stay on it much longer; I would take it all the way to the edge of the state—and then keep driving for 9 more days. I would see one too many McDonald’s. I would see the dilapidated remains of Route 66. I would see the forests and plains of this country and the breathtaking national parks of the Southwest. I would see the great houses of the ancestral Puebloans, built against the cliff walls at Chaco Canyon a millennium ago, neighbored by petroglyphs. I would feel the distance between home and California. I would take the time to make the transition not just physically but also psychologically. I would see 4,200 miles worth of this country, and I would eat up every inch of it. At the end, I would drive into my new home with a feeling of elation inside me. I would enter a city I did not know. I would start a life I could not predict. No matter how much you love a place or a life, there is something incomparable to trying a new one. To opening yourself up to everything and finding out how each possible bite tastes.

I loved Cambridge in a way that makes me pine for it as I picture myself walking down Brattle St. on a spring day . . . sitting by the river with a sandwich from Darwin’s . . . or lying beneath the lilacs in the Arboretum and looking at the sky. I lived there long enough to fall for an innumerable array of details that I hope not to forget.

It is important to recognize what you love. Cambridge was a good place to live, and I hold it strongly in my heart. Yet I cherish nothing above the sense of wonderment that exploration provides. I think my excitement for my friend truly came from the thought of her being somewhere unknown to her. Of her being at a corner and taking that first peek around.