Whenever people in LA tell me they’re going home, I say, “You go home every night.” Because, in Los Angeles, by “home” they usually mean that place they grew up, and it’s usually either on the East Coast (New York or New Jersey, most probably), or smack-dab in the middle of the country (Kansas, and so forth). I think that “home” is where you are now, and it’s best to get used to that notion as soon as you start living there.

Today someone texted me, relevant to a discussion we’d had earlier, to ask “What city did you grow up in?” I texted back:  “There wasn’t any city.” Which is true. While my wife grew up in “the city” — as I used to think of it as a boy, as in “please drive me into the city!”, that city being Egg Harbor City, population at the time 3200 — I grew up in a township. We had no city. I just checked, and Mullica Township has a population of 5,912 people scattered throughout its 56 acres. Which means it’s grown enormously since I left. For comparison, Burbank, California, my home since 1988, has 108,000 residents in 17.4 acres. Burbank has 6207 people per acre; when I was a boy, Mullica Township has about 53 people per acre. This is one reason why almost all my childhood friends were comic-book characters.

I didn’t text much more of that back. It seems beside the point. I grew up there; now I’m here. Recently I’ve been in San Francisco, Miami, and Las Vegas, and I’m soon to visit Washington DC and Baltimore. Two things that have been a constant in my life:  I’m still magnetically attracted to cities and to comic books. Anything to escape the woods.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 11th, 2010 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.