Where Did I Leave That Heart?

When people ask me where I'm from, they try to figure out why I chose to leave the bucolic mountain paradise that is Boulder, Colorado. "You left Boulder to come here?" Here is Oakland, California. I reply that it wasn't as if I had an atlas out and carefully picked a place to put down roots. Where I live is largely based on circumstance and rent-to-own furniture.
As I approached my thirtieth birthday, I had been living in Boulder for all but nine months of my life. The exception being my freshman year at Colorado College, where I spent most of the week gearing up for the hundred mile drive home for the weekend. I was then, and remain, hopelessly in love with the city of my youth. I moved to California because my girlfriend, the woman who would become my wife, had a number of nice pieces of antique furniture while I had a few slabs of particle board with subdued earth tone cushions stapled to them. She lived in Oakland because she had graduated from Mills College. I lived in Boulder because I was born there. The suggestion that I try anything new seemed as logical as anything I could come up with, and so with a heart filled with a mixture of anticipation and sorrow, I packed up my other worldly belongings and left that furniture behind.
Periodically, I take a little grief about my hometown. After all, I own a home in Oakland, shouldn't that be my hometown? On any given day I am never sure where my heart is. I am definitely not ready to adopt the Oakland Raiders as "My Team", but I have found room in my heart for the American League with the Oakland A's. From time to time, the artistic and cultural merits of Boulder are run under my nose, such as the recent sentencing of former child star Brian Bonsall for third degree assault. Why Alex P. Keaton's little brother picked Boulder to make his home after his fifteen minutes was up and his life took a dive is beyond me. Maybe it was the same bad ju-ju that brought the Ramseys to the foot of the Rocky Mountains to start their daughter off on her ill-fated journey to become the most famous Little Miss Colorado of all time. Maybe it's no coincidence that, in Stephen King's novel "The Shining", the Torrance family begin their odyssey from that same sleepy little college town.
Not that evil pervades there. Scott Carpenter, the fourth American in space, was born and raised in Boulder. He graduated from the same high school as I did, only thirty-seven years apart. Mork and Mindy lived there in the late seventies, which may be more of a curse than a blessing, but Stephen King did get around to making Boulder the home of the good guys after the superflu wiped out most of the rest of the world in "The Stand".
Oakland has Tower of Power, but Boulder has Firefall. Oakland has the Hell's Angels, but Boulder has Alan Ginsberg. Since life is a chance operation, full of opportunities and disappointments, I choose to be happy where I am for now. We've got a lot more furniture to move now.