There are many differences between my story and Dan’s (besides his being famous, and me not). Michael and I have not adopted, for instance. I have never, ever wanted to live in New York City (visits have been fine, but live there? Never!). And so on.
When people talked about how beautiful the mountains are, it was more of a “meh” for me than a “WTF.” I grew up in the central Rocky Mountain states. Mountains are supposed to always be there, being beautiful. It’s flat places (and how anyone can stand to live there) that always baffle me…
And snow? I am so over snow. If I never have to deal with snow again, even if I live to be millions of years old, I would not be unhappy. I’m sorry, all of you people who love snow, you can have mine, okay?
I’m serious. One of the things I found most amazing when, as a teenager, I came to live in western Washington, was the concept of children (or their parents) not having to plan on how a costume would work when trudging through snow trying to trick-or-treat. And getting through winter without seeing temperatures of 10° below zero Fahrenheit (or colder!) seemed like a miracle.
When I came to Seattle 28 years ago, I had absolutely no intention of staying. I was going to finish my degree, then head back to the small community in southwest Washington (or somewhere similar) where I had been living. People talking about the beautiful mountains did nothing for me. There were beautiful mountains at all the other places I considered living.
For me it wasn’t about learning to love the mountains, it was learning to love the city. At first I was always getting lost. I didn’t understand where all the neighborhoods were. The buses confused me. The roads really confused me (when you try to force a north-south crossed by east-west grid onto landscape with multiple hills, ridges, lakes, creeks and rivers, and a ship-canal all of which is squeezed into an hourglass-shaped spit of land caught between a big bay and a very large lake, weird things happen). Seriously, think about it: First Avenue West and First Avenue North are streets that run parallel to each other and are only two blocks apart! That’s right, we have a road called Queen Anne Avenue that runs north south. Just one block east of Queen Anne Avenue North, running parallel to it, is First Avenue North. However just one block west of Queen Anne Avenue North, running parallel to it, we have First Avenue West. How is that not confusing?
I’m not sure what my tipping point was. I wish I could say it was the many live theatre companies or museums, or something noble like that, but it wouldn’t be accurate. While I love those sorts of cultural things, and for a number of years had been a season ticket holder, I can also go years without attending any live theatre or live music events.
In the early years, after I finished school, friends and family would ask when I was “coming home.” Or they would ask how I could possibly stand to live in the city. I would tell them about very mundane things, such as the number of supermarkets that were open 24 hours. Or how easy it was to take a bus to get from one side of the city to another. How I could walk from my office to Pike Place Market, buy some fresh sea food, hop a bus home, and cook a fabulous dinner. Or if I didn’t want to do that, walk a short distance from my apartment to a thai restaurant, or the italian place a block further, or the caribbean place around the corner.
None of them understood how that could be appealing.
That’s because I was leaving out something that was far more important.
I was only just starting to come out of the closet. I wasn’t ready to tell most of them, yet. But having an active gay/lesbian community in the city, and because of that, having places where, if I happened to be dating a guy, we could be seen doing obvious date things without worrying overly much about being harassed or bashed was a big deal in 1990. It was also something I couldn’t expect back in the smaller towns I had planned to return to.
At that time, I didn’t know any openly gay people back home. There were people that we thought might be gay. There were rumors about some people who had moved away but hadn’t settled down to marry—people who avoiding giving any details about whether they were dating someone, or who might talk about a friend or roommate who stayed with them when they moved to a better place.
They weren’t the only ones who moved away and didn’t come back, of course. It’s not just queer people who leave small towns and make new lives in new places.
The real reason I loved the city was because no matter how weird or freakish a guy who liked both football and science, who loved musical theatre as well as science fiction movies, who loved to write my own stores, whose every visit to a bookstore was an adventure, who could spend hours talking about obscure historical/political topics, and who loved learning new things and explaining them to other people might be, in the city I could find thousands of people who shared those interests just as enthusiastically.
The tipping point was realizing that the primary appeal going back had was a return to the familiar. Going back meant a living where the pace of change was much slower.
Loving the city meant not just being open to change, not just embracing it, but rushing headlong into it and being excited at the mystery of not know exactly where it would take me.
Which, when you think about it, is what love of all kinds is really about.
Font Folly 