I was born in Massillon, Ohio, about 50 miles southeast of Cleveland. “Northern Ohio,” as I often say if someone asks, which isn’t too often. In September, of 2021, my brothers, also both born in Ohio, one in Cleveland and the other in Columbus, and I buried our mom’s remains in her family plot in a cemetery in Strasburg, Ohio not far from Massillon where she was also born. She was from Ohio, and she would always say so—but when she married my dad, their lives were less about the place they were from, than the places they eventually called home.
But when I say that, and if it imparts the idea that I’m an “Ohioan,” I’m probably being deceptive. I did live in Ohio for a time as a young child, and I have flashes of memory of it, but by the time I was born, the third of three, my family were actually living in Dover, Delaware where my dad worked at Wesley College. Dad was part of his generation’s great migratory educated who were from somewhere, in dad’s case, Pittsburgh, PA, and left their homes for college or military service or work, and began new lives somewhere else. He was an ambitious and well-educated young man who sought opportunities as they came along and his family went with him. Before I was 10 years old, we’d live in Ohio, Delaware, Illinois, Pennsylvania and California. From there, dad moved to Philadelphia, Boston, Washington and then back to California where he still lives.
My brightest childhood memories are of Chicago, IL and Hershey, PA. I remember school there, and friends and that lofty Generation X feeling we had that we could explore as far as we wanted. “Come home before the streetlights come on,” my mom would say and off my brothers and I would go, when I was 6, 7, and 8 years-old. In our little neighborhoods there was not much in the way of fear. One time, in Hershey, my brother and I were walking home from a friend’s house in the rain and a nice woman who we didn’t know stopped to pick us up, and took us home. We said thank you, and went inside. Mom and dad were a tad bit horrified and tried to impart to us that doing such a thing was dangerous—and we should not do it again. I have a burning memory of that, but I also remember wondering what the fuss was about?
In Illinois, during summer breaks, our town of Palatine had just completed paving several miles of walking and bicycle trails that took us all over. We’d meet up with friends and play the day away. I have distinct memories during that time of feeling free, and following an imagination that was just as free with my brothers, particularly my brother Jerry who is less than two years older than me, and our group of friends. We’d ride our bikes to the local K-mart along one of those paved paths in Palatine, where they sold Icees for a few cents, and on a hot day, little was better than that.
By the time we got to California, where I’ve spent the bulk of my life, we quickly made friends, and in the first few years we were there, our parents put a pool in our backyard and so friends would come to our house for the afternoon and sometimes evening, certainly as we all got older and grew into our teens. Arriving to the West Coast in 1975, we were there for the heyday of Southern California. Even in the midst of a hard economy with inflation and troubles, California was the promised land and there were jobs in aerospace and business, and people were flocking in something almost akin to the previous California migrations of the 1840’s and the 1930’s.
But for whatever reason, though I made great friends, many of whom are still my very closest friends of my life, I never fell in love with California. I fell in love with a native Californian girl, and we married in 1994 while I was still teaching and she worked as a clinical dietitian. Now, we have a daughter who is a native Californian as well. But there was always a part of me that wanted to go somewhere else.
It isn’t as sad as all that. I lived a life there, and realized that it really wasn’t the place that is important. When I lived as a boy near Chicago, my best friends lived there, too. When I lived in Hershey, PA, my best friends lived there, too—and when I moved to California, I made friends for a lifetime as I grew into an adult.
In the wine world, the ultimate goal for many winemakers is to express a sense of place with their wines. Yes, there are plenty of good blends in various bottles, but most winemakers want their wines to be a story of something from somewhere. It’s still true that some of the most sought after wines in the world are from single vineyards, even single blocks in a vineyard whether from Burgundy, Alsace, Rioja, Napa Valley or here in my new home in Washington.
Not to be glib, though, but people aren’t grapes—and the world is changing, not always for the better, it’s true. There are still many who are from a place and live there all their lives and are proud of the histories of their families in that place. But so many of us now are migratory, nomadic even, and the roots that we plant aren’t always in the ground, but rather with the people we love and the memories we create together.
In my life, I’ve been a Midwesterner, a Mid-Atlantic East Coaster, a Southern Californian and a Pacific Northwesterner, and so many of the people I know can say the same of themselves. I still think of myself as a Midwesterner primarily. That’s where I was born, where my people came from and where many of them lived out their lives. I wrote about placing my mom’s remains in the grave at Grand Union Cemetery in Strasburg in 2021, and of the myriad feelings that evinced themselves that day, one was my and my brothers’ own connection to that place. We’re from there.
And we’re also from other places. Our connections moved us well beyond the soil of northeastern and central Ohio. They’ve been watered by the friendships we’ve made all across the country from east to west. We are nobodies from nowhere and maybe history will simply record us as the great migratory masses who sought out a place to live because they were either forced to go there economically, or they had the luxury to choose where they wanted to be.
So, the definitions of where I’m from, my people, the place that bred me, has changed. So many of us now are less about the soil we grew in, than the soil we claimed and made our own—and if we’re true to this moment, then we realize what we really are is someone who belongs with someone else, for it’s the people we live our lives with who ultimately make our home.