No Moss

My boss, Diane, is fast approaching her thirtieth anniversary working for Sherwin Williams Meadville. Every time I think about that, I think about the fact that I have not, in my nearly sixty years, lived in one state for thirty years in a row. Yes, I lived in Florida for thirty two years, but that was in four segments, the longest stretching from March of 1978 to June of 2005, just over twenty seven years. This is what seems normal to me. I grew up, from 1953 until 1968, in Odenton, the town adjacent to Fort Meade, Maryland. Most of my friends moved in, told their tales of living in Germany, Japan, Okinawa and many other places, then moved away after two years.

In 1968 I moved to Florida, where almost nobody is a native, and certainly not native to the town where they live now.

When Carmen and I got married in 1986, we began making preparations to move to Central Florida, where there were better employment opportunities than what was available in Vero Beach. When we left Florida in 2005, we had inhabited, during our nineteen years together, five dwellings in three cities.

Then we moved to the Boston arier (that's how Bostonians say 'area') and were suddenly surrounded by people who had lived in the Boston area their whole lives, most of them in the same town, and some in the same house. I worked in Norwood, Massachusetts with a guy who was fifth generation still living in the house in which he was born. The forty year old guys who still lived in Norwood, Canton, Foxboro, Stoughton, Dedham and other nearby towns all still went to their high school football games and carried team rivalries into the workplace. And whereas I was excited for the opportunity to spend several weeks installing exhibits at the Museum of Science in Boston, those guys had been going to the MOS on field trips since elementary school, and were not at all interested in going back.

In 2009, as we were approaching Carmen's graduation from seminary and our move to Albuquerque, I was full of excitement for this next leg of the adventure that is our marriage. I explained to people that we would be in Albuquerque for a year of internship, then - who knows. The guys would just look at me as if I were from another planet - and I guess to them I was. Shawn Marler, on several occasions, said to me "A rolling stone gathers no moss." I guess that explains my moss free lifestyle.

Diane listens to me telling about the eleven cities in five states where I've lived during her lifetime in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and she doesn't have that 'another planet' look. She looks more like someone in her fifties who has worked in one job and lived in one town her whole life and is envious of someone like me. Well, except for that moss thing.