Smalltown

Earlier tonight I was talking to a friend from college who now lives out of state and has always stood by his opinion that Boston is a townie town, i.e. people who are born here (not that anyone is ever actually born or raised IN Boston, just close to it) never leave, or always return, and natives will obsessively extoll its virtues to anyone who will listen.

I started to disagree on principle, and then I realized that I was sitting on my bed with the Improper Bostonian flipped open to an article about fall dining in the city (which I do more reading about than eating, but I love fall and I LOVE fall menus... cider apple soup, pumpkin ravioli, baked apples, cornbread and cranberry stuffing, I could go on) while watching the Sox play, and win, their first postseason game (last October I drew a big, optimistic "07" in the centerfield dirt at Fenway with my sneaker, so here's hoping). All I needed was Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in the other room writing a screenplay.

When I told him this, he started presenting more proof of my townie status, pointing out that my split second reaction after hearing that a friend moved to California was "Why would anyone DO that?" and that my idea of a money shot is the view of the Boston skyline after the Cambridge tolls on the Pike. He reminded me that anytime I go to New York for the weekend I get homesick (what, Manhattan is freakin' scary!) and he still insists that when my road rage creeps in, so does a slight Boston accent. I deny that, but okay fine, if that's your definition of a townie, then guilty as charged, I guess. I love the seasons, being close to the water, the fact that it's a baseball town, the overall sense of coziness, the locally brewed beer, the Cape, how people are wicked smaht... okay, I'm just driving the point home now. "Born and raised" sounds so provincial, I know, but I can't imagine living anywhere else. I'd never want to be transient, but I suppose if you don't like to be trapped in one area for too long then you feel as strongly about that as I do about being a country mouse (living five miles outside of a major city). Most of the people that I love are here, and I've always been happy here. I imagine that if they weren't or I wasn't, I would've made a different decision long ago.

Do you guys feel a major connection to where you live? Would you up and move for any old reason, or have you in the past? If you didn't have job/family/etc. connections to where you live now, would you move somewhere else?

And this is the perfect time to comment, because The Great Delurking Day was... oh. Yesterday. Yeah! So anyway.