You're boarding a spaceship to colonize Mars. This is no move across town, nor even around the globe; in all likelihood, you're saying goodbye forever to your parents, your friends, your favorite places -- everything that's ever meant anything to you, beyond the small parcel on your lap. What lies ahead is a new life in an unknown land, surely an adventure, hopefully not a disaster, and a future you can't begin to imagine. Are you with me so far? Now you're beginning to understand how the first European settlers felt when they set sail for America.

In the early days of the Republic, there were more pressing matters to attend to than pop music. Only in the 1820s did this nation of immigrants finally get around to its first official Hit Song. The number they embraced spoke well of their adjustment to the New World:

A couple of centuries later, Amy and I moved from San Francisco to New York. The trip took about six hours. There was no compelling reason to do it; in fact, it was a highly counterintuitive, impulsive, even nonsensical thing to do. We were both deeply rooted in the Bay Area, having spent our entire adult lives there. Many of our closest friends lived right in our neighborhood, including most of my old college crowd. It was the place we'd met, fallen in love, moved in together. As Neil Young would say, all our changes were there.

And, objectively speaking, San Francisco is about the best place you can live. Incredible scenery, vibrant culture, liberal politics, beautiful weather (fog and wind permitting) --throw in a big, booming Silicon Valley economy, and a person would be crazy to leave. But leave we did. By the end of the 90s, the shine was off the Bay Area for us. The houses were too expensive, the parking was too tight, the restaurants were too full of dot-com assholes yammering about business models and strike prices. It wasn't the same place we'd once loved.

There was also an element of restlessness. Life was sweet, but we were spoiled; living so long surrounded by dear friends and favorite places, we took it all for granted and began to wonder what else there might be. We'd managed to remain irresponsible and uncommitted long into our twenties but it couldn't last forever, and on the horizon loomed babies, mortgages and the long march of domesticity. If we were going to squeeze in one last adventure, it had to be soon. We made the decision the week we got engaged, and left not long after our wedding.

Unlike the colonists, we had no notion that our relocation would be permanent. Four years, seven at the most, then we'd be back home in San Francisco, our wanderlust sated, happy to grow old with our buddies in the long Pacific sunset.

But first: New York City! We rode in from JFK in a stretch limo with our cats on the floor. We explored Manhattan from top to bottom and river to river, its bars, galleries, theaters and museums, its sights, sounds and faces. We already had a few old friends in town; we made interesting new ones--actors, writers, college professors. We hosted eclectic dinner parties late into the night, and toasted our good fortune in the garden of our Upper West Side apartment. We called our buddies back home and regaled them with tales of our new life, winking at each other as they responded with the same old thing (sorry, guys).

Then somehow, things weren't quite so great. My freelance business, devastated by the dot-com crash, dwindled almost to nothing, while the San Francisco agency Amy still worked for suffered round after around of layoffs, cutting ever closer. Hot off the printer, the novel I'd worked on for so long elicited universal indifference from the literary marketplace. My best friend from childhood joined us in the city, only to endure a long stretch of unemployment and deepening depression. Over a stretch of six months, Amy underwent an emergency appendectomy, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, we lost a pregnancy and our city was devastated by terrorists. Then we lost another pregnancy. Real life had resumed.

Once simply our playground, the city and its places began to evoke more complex associations. The path around the Reservoir where we always seemed to have our money conversations. The crappy bar on Amsterdam where our favorite bartender never failed to drown our sorrows. The downtown streets where we distracted ourselves while waiting for the latest lab test results. The crowded post office at the corner where I mailed out my manuscript, and the one I had to go to further uptown when it came back, time after time. The Union Square restaurant where we celebrated good news, and went to anyway when there wasn't any in sight. The rooftop on 13th Street where we stared at the southern sky.

Time was passing, and the practical decisions we'd dodged in San Francisco began to catch up with us. In two years, we'd already spent enough on rent to have bought my parents' house in Indianapolis -- and that for a place too small for a baby. There had been a time when we'd said, "We're not moving all the way across the country to live in Brooklyn!" Now we only prayed we could afford to buy there -- and get moved in before Amy went into labor. We couldn't have managed a return to San Francisco if we'd wanted to, but the thought never entered our minds. We weren't done yet.

Bobby began his life on a clear, cold day in Manhattan, relocating with us to Park Slope soon after. He couldn't have made a better choice. This is where all his favorite playgrounds are, it's convenient to his Music for Aardvarks class and the rough rhythms of the pathways in Prospect Park are just right for soothing him to sleep when his teeth are bothering him. All his best friends live here: Henry, Mario, Abbey, Shelly at Carvel and, most importantly, his beloved Pansy, the nanny who cares for him as one of her own. It's clear how Bobby would vote on the East Coast-West Coast issue.

We've kept in touch with our friends in San Francisco after a fashion, but the time difference makes phone calls tricky, and after all, they're as caught up in their daily lives as we are in ours. We've urged them to visit, but few have; they have jobs, mortgages, babies. On our periodic trips West, it's a relief to find the old bonds as strong as ever --stronger, perhaps, for having survived the test of separation. They still love us; we still love them. Everywhere we go, we get the same question: "When are you moving back?" We dissemble, knowing on some level that there is no "back."

We hadn't planned it this way. It seems a cruel twist of fate for the music to have stopped with us so far away from our loved ones, especially with all the kids now in the picture. When you're starting a family, you form a special bond with the other new parents around you, as with the strong friendships you develop in your 20s when your own life is so new. In an ideal world, both sets of friends are one and the same. Without intending to, we gave that up, just as we gave up the luxury of living in the same city as Bobby's grandparents -- or three cities, as the case may be. Thanks a lot, modern world.

There are moments when it seems inevitable that we will finish our story in San Francisco, times when our original timeframe of seven years still seems about right. Bobby will be four by then, ready to become best friends with our best friends' kids. We wouldn't have missed much; we could seamlessly resume our old lives, get my car out of Amy's mom's garage in LA, go in on Giants tickets with the others, get the old gang together as easily as picking up the phone. Within a few years, it would be just as if we'd never left. On our most recent trip, it seemed so natural that we even told our friends how we were feeling--cruelly, in retrospect.

I know the folks in San Francisco would love nothing more than for Amy and me to clutch Bobby in our arms, close our eyes, click our heels and repeat, "There's no place like home ... There's no place like home ... There's no place like home." As a matter of fact, we do that every day. But when we open our eyes, we're still in Brooklyn.