Sitting tight

[redbird]

There's a meme floating around, look up and post the distance (and driving time--it's a US meme) between your childhood and current homes. I didn't bother looking anything up: I know that my childhood home, meaning the house I lived in from ages 5 to 18, is about an hour and a half from my current home by subway.

When I mentioned to someone at work that I spent New Year's with family in Montreal, they asked whether I'd grown up there.

The oddity, for a New Yorker, isn't that I have family (blood and choice) in three countries: it's that this is true and I was born and raised in this city of immigrants.

Comments

[carandol.livejournal.com]

That's easy... I'm at home at the moment. If I turn my head and look out of the window to my right, I can see the hospital I was born in, just across the road! My childhood home is about a mile away.

The furthest I've lived from my childhood home is Nikolausberg, near Göttingen in Germany, which is about 480 miles away. I don't drive, but its about 22 hours by coach, or about 9 by train and plane.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

I live in the same city where I was born - the only one of my family to do so, not counting my nephew (who's 12).

I have family in England and Canada (and, I'm told, distant cousins in Bermuda, about whom I know nothing).

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yah, in some sense I'm still living in the home I grew up in, at least from the age of 7 on. Within about a year, though, my parents will be selling the house, so there's significant looming trauma here, made worse by the knowledge that it's not unlikely that whatever buyers will want to do a teardown of the present building.

So I'm not exactly sure what to do with that meme. Maybe I'll post about it.

[suecochran.livejournal.com]

My parents sold their home in Brooklyn this past June and moved to lower Manhattan. It was a traumatic move - the getting ready for moving part. They'd owned the house for thirty years, and I spent most of my important coming-of-age years there. It also was my sanctuary many times in recent years. I suffer from bipolar 2, and there were several periods where I would come up to stay with my parents, sometimes for close to a year at a time when I found myself unable to care for myself and my son. There was also a ton of accumulated detritus from the past that had to be tossed - I'd thought I would get to sort through it, but in the end most of it got thrown out, and I'm the better for not having had to go through all of that letting go (I also have OCD and both my parents and myself are hoarders - letting go of things is HUGE).

[ailbhe]

But which of my childhood homes? They were so far apart! Especially in journey time... It's quicker to get from here to my *first* childhood home than from here to my mother's current home, where I "left home from".

[suecochran.livejournal.com]

I was born in Manhattan and lived there until I was three. Then we moved to a two-family house in Brooklyn until I was seven, moved to an apartment house until I was 11, and finally moved to the house that we lived in for 30 years (which my parents just recently sold (I wrote about that in another comment here). All of the homes but the first one were in Brooklyn, New York. I now live in Lorton, Virginia, and it's about 250 miles from here to Brooklyn, which is about a 5 hour drive (depending on your speed of course, and traffic. I think one crazy time I made it up there in 3 1/2 hours - very pedal to the metal.)