Athens, Ohio (1997) -- It was the usual breakfast of Mexican coffee and English cigarettes with the usual companion, Erik, my closest friend. The breakfast was a Friday morning ritual where we'd catch up on the events of the week and generally opt out of all responsibility for a few hours. We'd always start with the usual conversation -- we should stop smoking or we drink too much coffee.

That Friday, Erik leaned over the little wooden table in the aging cafe where we'd become regulars, mused over my swirling cigarette smoke for a moment too long and sighed, he was leaving our shared Midwest college town in search of the elusive grown-up life and career.

We spent the day together, like so many others. There was nothing that I could tell you about that afternoon that would make it different, give it that gravitas of a finale. Six of us -- a random mix of a much larger circle -- ended up in Erik's apartment with its hotel-length hallway, lazing around the big living room, seated on and around someone's grandmother's hand-me-down couch (suddenly keeper of all manner of experience). One flipped through a Rolling Stone, only really reading the ads; another cradled the latest copy of his much revised screen play; Erik tore through the NYT Sunday Book Review; I hunched over some Tom Clancy novel I would later deny reading; a roommate slept under an open copy of a broadcast text; and an ex clutched a calculus notebook with genuine fear. The television droned on in the background. The taped TV-version of The Breakfast Club was playing, largely ignored except for the occasional say-alongs (it's a fat girl's name) with favorite quotes of 80s class-consciousness drama.

And, yet that was the last day of a place I called home.

I suppose that time as much as the place was as close to a real hometown as I've known. I never made that connection with the place I grew up. Instead, I've always found home in unexpected places, laying down roots where other's tend to pass through and attaching my heart to unsustainable lifestyles. From my anchor in the college town to a beautiful forest I knew as a child, my homes never quite line up with high school football games, pizza parlors, homecoming dances and the other familiar hallmarks of left behind hometowns. Instead, I play the field, giving myself in different ways to each familiar place and moving, always moving, to find more.

The town I grew up in

North Sewickley (Beaver County), PA (1975-1993) -- The town I grew up in is home to my father's house and the high school I attended and the grave that now holds the first boy I kissed. It has well-signed escape routes in case of catastrophe at the nearby nuclear power plant; an equal number of churches / bars / "beauty parlors"; and fields of corn and cows. It's close enough to the bedroom communities outside Pittsburgh to be developing something of a split personality -- with $150 rounds of Tour-quality golf a few short miles from open chemical plants and closed steel mills. The adjacent town is called Big Beaver, home to Sadie's Big Beaver Restaurant (a name that I did not realize was funny until my road-tripping friends caused a country-highway traffic snarl, piling out of the car to be pictured in front of it.)

What that town is not home to is me. As much as I miss my family and enjoy climbing around the surrounding hills or listening to the cluck-clucking stories of the now-strangers who watched me grow up, that town has never held the distinct qualities of home. Somehow in the daze of adolescence, I missed the chance to build that connection. I lived there, but didn't claim it as my own, didn't recognize its quirky details or make time to learn its secrets. I never missed it when I was away or settled in comfortably when I returned. Somehow, I assigned it the personality of a hotel room -- boldly decorated, vaguely comfortable and still entirely bland and quickly forgotten.

Growing up in my parent's ranch-style house, surrounded by its flowerbeds, ranging vegetable garden, and occasional escaped cow from one of the nearby farms, I clung mostly to my bedroom. Built-in bunk beds on the south wall, shelves of teddy bears on the north, a rainbow carpet under foot. But, more importantly, a poster of New York City marred with finger-oil stains, the Chronicles of Narnia in their entirety, a slew of little somethings from places I admired. I had been plotting my escape from a very young age. Not that there was anything wrong with the town -- I just didn't belong there. Some people would say that I tried not to fit in and they would be right and wrong.

To remember it, I never really lived there, it was more an ill-fitting jacket snagging at my fantasies -- like the catacomb of colorfully-decorated, squishy-soft, candy-filled rooms that I knew were right under the floor board if only I could find the secret door.

That town is both the punch line of my jokes and a place where my regrets strut vainly. As for my real home, you'll find it at the summer camp I went to as a kid, on the bike path in Chicago, at wherever my best friends call their homes. Compared to these clear memories with their drunken tug of emotion, my "home town" is simply an "also lived."

On moving on

Elsewhere in the World (1993 - 2004) -- My best friend's grandmother had a saying worthy of something between a needlepoint sampler and a book jacket -- "three moves are as good as a fire." In a culture bent on accumulating, moves are something of a spring cleaning of the soul -- an opportunity to shake off that creepy aging smell of things, to fill bulging black trash bags with the saved detritus of every day life and to give away the excess that filled in the blank spaces that didn't need filling.

I hope to never live anywhere more than five years. With so much to see and do, I can't imagine living any other way. Moving is a chance to evaluate yourself, to know who you are, to change even when you don't feel like changing. It's a force that demands reinvention and creativity; it reestablishes connections and builds new ones; it brings with it freshly baked cookies and strained muscles.

This itchy unrest is something those close to me have come to understand -- they know I am simply outrunning the peculiar smell that hangs in long-lived places. Even my loyal mutt -- Small Brown Bear -- has grown accustomed to my wandering. In one notably short move, he was pictured dragging his favorite toys from one apartment to another.

I move to keep finding new familiar places and to escape the friendly confines of other's recollections that would otherwise forever frame who I am. Life is simultaneously fleeting and frozen. And there is nothing to do but climb around its hills and race age and decay.

Moving was part of the magic and mayhem that so attracted me to Athens, and, to some extent, the school -- Ohio University -- that drew so many to its cobblestoned streets. I lived in seven houses and apartments there -- and I knew for sure that the town, if not those rooms, was home. Even today, many years later, I will remember how I lived in that place...more often from a postcard or a particular breeze rather than from the place itself. Because the place itself is dirty with lost and muddied socks dropped in the endless parade to and from the 25-cent laundry; socked sandals and drooping jeans with torn and unraveling cuffs; pierced faces, sweaty bodies, dirty pony-tailed hair; flannelled tops, bottoms, heads and toes; cigarette butts tossed with fashionable malaise, burrito wrappers, class schedule slips, receipts with "authorized signatures" and parents' names; abandoned soda cans, dry pens; the occasional mitten or sorority key chain...and so much banal, anonymous cacophony.

But, it was also the place with moments of simple amusement and powerful personality. It was where I argued economics in a worker-owned bar. The crusty dred-locks of my bartender flipping up as he laughed at a newspaper headline about the Congress approving a balanced budget and a tax cut, seemed a bit incongruous to him. And over a mug that held more whisky than coffee, I shot back, it makes perfect sense, cuts in the progressive tax rate structure empirically create fiscal relief by spurring real dollar growth in tax revenue. His bloodshot eyes rolled towards me, something citrus was caught in his unkept goatee, he smirked in the way that people who think heart is superior to mind tend to condescend to those who disagree.

Ah, I admit, I occasionally jones for college and coffee shops and those inane yet inspiring conversations where we "discover" the well-trod trials of human experience. I enjoy the pseudo intellectual blur.

Home off the map

The home there was in the crystalline quality of the memories, of the warm glow they hold. It was in feeling the rhythm of the place and talking easily with familiar strangers. Home is in knowing your favorite of every little thing and recognizing the sameness and changes in the details. It's returning a decade later and feeling an unearned happiness and unexplained peace.

I have found home in many places -- all as transient as a college town. There was a summer camp in Western Pennsylvania where I spent one week a summer for a decade or so. I could feel the welcome in the way my jittery, teenaged personality settled into my skin when we drove through the gate. I still remember the names of the trails and caves I knew so well there, the breakfasts I most enjoyed, the rituals that brought us back every year, the words to the badly sung songs. The snipes I hunted and the freezing water I braved to be crowned a polar bear.

There was a weekend with a friend's parents in a sparsely decorated near-mansion on the curve of a cul de sac that was marked by the happy antics of a mom enjoying cheap wine out of a Garfield mug and a surreal family day trip that involved matching outfits (on quite unmatched companions).

And, a certain beach along the north of Chicago where I watched sunrises and lazed away hours and knew nearly everyone who was regular there -- at least by their dogs' names.

These and many other moments and places have been my home. And, with only a few years ever left before my next move, perhaps I'll find a more traditional home someday. Or, I will be a happy wanderer -- with great roots that will cross my world in their growing.