A Ramblin' Guy Rambles On

This column, published Dec. 28, 2008, originally appeared as my annual Christms Letter, in slightly different form.

It goes without saying that I'm a rambling sort of guy, but I'm going to say it anyway: I'm a rambling sort of guy. And I don't mean my conversational style.

Always on the move, I am. Never comfortable staying in one place too long, me. A highway junkie, I need the ol' white line. My life's motto is, "A rolling stone gathers no moss." Or, as Publilius Syrus put it, from the original Latin: "People always moving, with no roots in one place, avoid responsibilities and cares." (He had quite a way with the words, that Publilius.)

So when I discovered recently that I had been living at the same address for 26 years, the news took me completely by surprise. Are you sure, I asked? Can you check those dates again, please, because I'm a rambling sort of guy and to stick around that long in one location would not fit my particular, well, idiom. But they looked and there it was in black and white: I'd been living at the same address on South Church Street (The Best Street in Chester County) in West Chester since December 1982. You know, back when the Soviet Union still existed and the use of tobacco was condoned in public buildings.

So of course I had to move, which I did last week. Goodbye South Church, hello West Miner.

I started living at the top of a beautiful brick building on South Church Street across from the well-known Buffalo Bill Cody home and had gradually been working my way down the staircase over the years, so it was fairly well assured that I'd be out the front door at some point. Now just seemed the perfect time to roll away, seeing as I've noticed some green bryophyta developing in the spaces between my toes.

I started in an apartment on the front of the third floor, in a two-room place with virtually no furniture, a kitchen stuck in a corner much like an afterthought, and a small bathroom with a sheet-metal shower stall. After a spell in a third-floor rear apartment that in the summer felt more like "The Box" that the prison guards send Paul Newman to in "Cool Hand Luke when he misbehaves ("What we have here is a failure to persperate") than any other place on Earth, I ended up on the second floor in a four-room apartment that contained more in the way of cultural artifacts than you would guess a man of my age and situation could reasonably be expected to have accumulated. Or, as my landlord once put it, "You got a lotta clutter."

There is a mystical sort of symmetry — which happens to be my favorite sort of symmetry — in the place I am moving to and the place I am moving from. My new home is a two-room apartment on the third floor with a small bathroom — perhaps even smaller than the one I brushed my teeth in back in 1982. But this time I'll have plenty of furniture, and not the kind that was created by placing wooden planks across the plastic milk cartons stolen from area convenience stores — the statute of limitations for, I might point out, have expired.

And although I've spent far too long in that old place on South Church Street for a rambling sort of guy like me, I have learned a few things in the years I spent there. Such as:

It can take 150 years to grow the perfect sugar maple tree, but only a day to take it down.

Parking spaces will appear magically when it is raining and you've got a load of groceries in the car. They will disappear, however, when the meter maid is on the prowl.

Most importantly, the electricity will always stay on in a summer thunderstorm, but only on the other side of the street.

I wish all of you happiness in your homes in the coming year, and hope that you will wander by and see my new place sometime. Don't wait too long, however, because, well, you know me …