Home Sweet Home

People everywhere think that the place of their birth is the best place possible in which to live.  Some never leave home physically.  It is estimated that more than half of the 350 million people in the U.S. live within 30 miles of the place where they were born.

Of the other half, the ones that move away, many take with them the mental attitudes they developed as children. 

My great-grandfather, living in a log cabin in an isolated community 30 miles from the tiny village of Dallas, needed a gun to protect his family from marauding Comanche Indians.  Do I, living in the same area, need a pistol to protect myself from a stranger creeping up to my third-floor apartment to attack me?  I don’t think so.  My brother Don, living nearby, is a gun collector and a staunch supporter of the National Rifle Association.

I grew up thinking Texas was the best place in the World.  A paradise on Earth.  In July and August we dealt with the horrendous heat by opening all the windows and plugging in the electric fans.  “Oscillating” fans were the best, as they turned side to side, stirring the air.  We went to the “picture show” several times a week; movie theaters were the only places in town that were air-conditioned.  It was summer, and summers were hot everywhere.  Right? 

As a young adult I moved to Chicago and discovered another kind of heat.  Temperature plus humidity.  At 90 degrees I sweltered, more miserable than I’d been in Texas when the thermometer registered 100.   People who grew up in Chicago told me to forget my Texas way of thinking.  Wasn’t I now living in Chicago, “the most wonderful place in the World”? 

Thirty years later I moved to New Mexico and found what to me was the ideal place to live: a high, dry desert, not too hot in summer, not too cold in winter.  Best of all, it had diverse people.  I had friends who were highly educated, others with only three-years of schooling.  My friends included Hispanics, Indians (American and Asian), Anglos, blacks, whites, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Quakers, gays and straights.  I liked that.  As a bonus, coming from the plains of Texas and Illinois, I could sit on my patio and enjoy my view of the Sandia and Monzano Mountains.

My son David grew up in Chicago.  He escaped those brutal winters and found his ideal place in Southern California, where he lives in a predominately Chinese and East Indian neighborhood  within a thirty-minute drive from the ocean.  Different from me, but right for him.

Some people get stuck in the attitudes of the place where they were born.  Others are able to change as they mature.  Darned if I know how to encourage the former to become the latter.  No individual needs an automatic weapon to defend his home against an unlikely burglar, but I will never convince my brother of the importance to gun control.