Shifting

 I don't spend a lot of time considering where I live. 

I live in Oakland, California. Latest calculations put me at just over half my life in this one place. 

I don't get around much. 

Which may be why I don't spend a lot of time considering where I live. What brought me here was a bunch of rent-to-own furniture that did not stack up well with the rooms of antiques that my wife had acquired. She wasn't my wife then, but the furniture was antique. She lived in Oakland with her antiques, and if I wanted to live with her I was probably going to have an easier time negotiating those arrangements by packing up the rest of my worldly possessions and moving them to where the antiques were.

When my record collection and I landed here on the left coast, it did not occur to me that this had the potential of being a forever thing. Thirty-one years have passed and I have become a taxpaying card-carrying resident of the land of Oaks. Birthplace of the Black Panthers. Home of Frank Oz, Ricky Henderson and Clint Eastwood. When I got there, there was a major league baseball team, a professional football franchise, and an NBA squad who hadn't won a championship for some time. 

Things change. Messrs. Eastwood, Henderson and Oz have moved on. As have the football and basketball teams. We may be experiencing the death throes of the Oakland A's even as we speak. No matter. I'll be here if they leave, with my tattered green and gold t-shirts to remember those times. 

Because I hang around until I am asked to move. It just feels right not to hop about the country when I live with all these antiques in this historical locale filled with a number of nature's wonders. The history and the nature are the things that don't often occur to me when I am going about my day-to-day business out there in the world. I am focused on the mundane, and not the exceptional. It takes someone from another chunk of land to show up and remind me that where I live has a lot to offer.

Almost makes me happy that I got talked into moving here all those years ago.