View Full Version : What would your life have been like?
Ultralight
7-6-19, 12:11pm
What would your life have been like if you had stayed in your hometown? Or what might your life have been like if you had left your hometown?
I ask because I thought very seriously about this "alternate history" on July 4th when I went back to my hometown for the day.
Would I have married a big Midwestern single mom who often dressed in over-sized Looney Tunes t-shirts and high-water sweatpants and chain-smokes?
Would I have ridden that horrible roller-coaster of manufacturing jobs that goes boom and bust (mostly bust)?
Would I have many of the same problems my friends from old neighborhood have? Drugs? Alcohol? Child-support payments? Kids I find out too late aren't biologically mine? Petty crime?
ToomuchStuff
7-6-19, 3:05pm
You want me to guess what it would have been based on nearly infinite variables? Stayed in the town I was born in.
You want me to guess what it would have been based on nearly infinite variables?
Yup!
iris lilies
7-6-19, 3:30pm
I can’t imagine staying in that town where I last lived in Iowa, my hometown. I dislike it. I do not, however, mind the immediate area so I would have moved someplace around there if I am playing this game. Des Moines is an OK city. It has pockets of architecture that interest me. Des Moines suburbs have no architecture of value or interest, they are a barren wasteland of post WWII houses, most of which hurt my eyes.My hometown has especially egregious suburban architecture since it was never a place where many middle-class or any upper middle class moved, it was always mostly blue-collar people who built the houses so they were cheap.
My brother stayed in our hometown and he does fine. He has no children and a wife and a house full of fat spoiled cats. they make decent money. He and the wife both work in Des Moines in the health field. They take tons of vacations, it seems like they are gone about 10 times a year.
Let's see--my birthplace (where the nearest hospital was) was a bustling metropolis of around 10,000, and my hometown logged some 350 souls...There really wasn't anything to do but leave, which my parents did when the bloom on resort life faded. Maybe I would have been an artist/writer/beach bum who worked in a cannery or slung fried clams at a local eatery to support myself. We'll never know.
I have never lived more than 10 miles from home even though I moved a great deal. Now getting to travel in my later years I often wonder how life could have been if I moved to some of the lovely places I have visited. Wish I had nine lives....
I have never lived more than 10 miles from home even though I moved a great deal. Now getting to travel in my later years I often wonder how life could have been if I moved to some of the lovely places I have visited. Wish I had nine lives....
That would be an interesting thread. Where would you live if given the choice of those you have visited?
I can't imagine - the small town of a couple thousand people on the shore of Lake Erie in Ohio would not have been able to contain me.
I dont have a hometown, even my parents have had major moves 5 times. My mom moved more than that growing up.
Ultralight, that seems pretty negative. I know some of the places i lived would not have been a place to stay, but sometimes i do wish for a hometown. My parents are in a suburb of Des Moines. It is a newer neighborhood with very monochromatic style. But they have everything they need and room for us all to stay.
I grew up in Alaska and would have loved to stay. But job opportunities for growth simply do not exist. Husband was able to enter corporate management, complete his education and have many more career opportunities in Indiana. I would not have had the same chances for jobs within my agency and probably would have retired from the same job after 30 years of boredom. The jobs resulted in us being able to retire comfortably and early.
Now that we have been in IN for over 40 years, it is our hometown and we will be staying.
I'd be married to a banker, or broker, or some such. I grew up in a fawncy place. Not my cuppa.
iris lilies
7-6-19, 8:38pm
This is what they are building in my home town. Where is the house!?!?!!! Never mind, it isnt important. It is our Ford 150 trucks that are important and we built them houses and will put up the humans in a shack around back.
2862
Small town 3000 people. Left in 79. Still small at only 4000 people. I don't even want to think about still living there. Gossip is the primary entertainment. I married pregnant and still haven't given birth after 39 years. People work in food service or at the fish hatchery or the fish food plant.
NOPE NOPE NOPE!
Ultralight
7-6-19, 10:15pm
This is what they are building in my home town. Where is the house!?!?!!! Never mind, it isnt important. It is our Ford 150 trucks that are important and we built them houses and will put up the humans in a shack around back.
2862
LOL!!!
Like Bae, I feel the city of my birth would have been insufficient to contain my transcendent spirit and protean genius. Chicago is simply not vast enough.
Had I not left my home town to serve in the military, the most likely outcome would have been the West losing the Cold War sometime in the mid-eighties. A fearful and demoralized America would have eventually become a Soviet client state. I would currently be residing in a re-education camp in North Dakota, assembling rotary dial telephones and listening to mandatory NPR broadcasts of the works of Noam Chomsky.
Thant's an interesting thought experiment. I grew up in San Antonio in an old money hood (though I was not part of that strata). It was a place where old money families married into other old money families to continue the lineage and comfortable ways. Had I stayed, I would have probably sought out one of those dudes who had a huge cattle ranch and a house in the city. It is an unchanging way of life there but one I left long ago.
ApatheticNoMore
7-7-19, 1:56am
I don't know, my regrets are mostly about education and career choices, sometimes social and dating choices although less often, and not about where I live. So I've spend very little time thinking about it.
I moved so much in my life, enjoyed each part of it and relish my life today. Being part of the late 60's, I had highs and lows, opportunities, options, education in new fields and employment. I used them all to great advantage - rural life, small villages, cities and now a quiet beautiful town near Lake Erie. Love my life, every part of it. It just unfolded naturally. Trying to imagine my life in any stop along the way is like stopping a beautiful song partway through, it stops being a song.
iris lilies
7-7-19, 8:51am
Like Bae, I feel the city of my birth would have been insufficient to contain my transcendent spirit and protean genius. Chicago is simply not vast enough.
Had I not left my home town to serve in the military, the most likely outcome would have been the West losing the Cold War sometime in the mid-eighties. A fearful and demoralized America would have eventually become a Soviet client state. I would currently be residing in a re-education camp in North Dakota, assembling rotary dial telephones and listening to mandatory NPR broadcasts of the works of Noam Chomsky.
OMG!!! Thank you so much for your service!:)
Small town 3000 people. Left in 79. Still small at only 4000 people. I don't even want to think about still living there. Gossip is the primary entertainment. I married pregnant and still haven't given birth after 39 years. People work in food service or at the fish hatchery or the fish food plant.
NOPE NOPE NOPE!
Sounds very much like my home town. "Gossip is the primary entertainment" says it all. The library was one town over and the size of a shoebox. Shudder.
This is what they are building in my home town. Where is the house!?!?!!! Never mind, it isnt important. It is our Ford 150 trucks that are important and we built them houses and will put up the humans in a shack around back.
2862
Good grief!That hurts my eyes.
I grew up in a suburb of Noo Yawk City. Moving out to the Midwest for college was a huge culture shock as almost all of the (extended) family lived in The Empire State. But once i got over the culture shock I rather liked most of it, to the point that when I graduated from college without a job, I couldn't live back home for long and decided to move to Minnesota.
I have no good idea of what life would have been like for me had I not moved. It's awfully easy to be provincial about the rest of the country when you grow up in Noo Yawk (moving to the Midwest was an attempt to combat that). That New Yorker Magazine cover about New York and the rest of the world? Yeah.
http://www.mappery.com/maps/A-View-of-World-from-9th-Avenue-Map.mediumthumb.jpg
I probably would be jeering on the Mets (never the Yankees!), tawkin' with an accent, and enjoying far better Italian food than I do now. Some of my peers from high school bought houses around the block from their parents. I can't imagine a world that small. Moving opened me up to the idea that people can happily live differently and that there are good and bad aspects to any place. New York City's suburbs are the right place for some people. They were not for me.
Teacher Terry
7-7-19, 10:42am
Moved due to first husband being in the service. Moved back to my hometown of 89k to raise my kids and bought the house next door to my parents. It was awesome and we had a great time. I helped my mom take care of my dad and she watched the kids so I could attend college. After getting my 3 college degrees there were not enough professional jobs in the town and I didn’t have any connections. So started to interview nationwide and since my husband could get a job anywhere quickly because of his skill set we moved to Kansas. When I divorced him I got my job out West and never looked back. I visit my hometown but I love it here.
I grew up in Milford, CT, a nice size town, and I have a lot of good memories of the place. It was also ALMOST commutable to Manhattan, and I did that for about 5-6 months and then moved to Westchester County, NY to be closer to work. I loved working in NYC, and if I had stayed in Milford, I would have either not found a job I loved, or I would have been bored, or both. My brother still lives there and loves it. I also probably would have married a guy I went to both proms with--really nice guy, but I prefer the one I wound up marrying.
On an interesting note, our place in Grand Isle is the farthest from US Route 1 that I've ever lived--the Route 1 that goes from Maine to Florida. I've lived just off of Route 1 for over 60 years of my life (in CT and NJ), and I've always thought it would be fun to take a road trip its entire length. I now live just off US Route 2. If I kept going on the same pattern, I wonder how long it would take me to move to a place off of Rt. 66. :)
It's a mute point for me. Didn't stay and have made many more choices and decisions throughout my life that have gotten me where I am today rather than "somewhere else". I'm good looking forward instead of "what if" backward. :)
I love[d] my hometown and lived in it for many years into adulthood. It was a time when everybody knew everybody. The population was never more than 1,500 when I lived there. It is nearing 9.500 now, having grown quickly over the past five years. I moved away in the mid '00s to return to school in another city 7 hours away, then to Florida and back to the area. I wouldn't live in my hometown now. It makes me actually physically uncomfortable (anxious, sad, stomach flutters) to drive there now (my daughter still lives there).
I doubt if much would have changed about me if I'd stayed; if my husband hadn't left me we might still own our five acres and built our underground home (70s dream) and I'd be farming. Be that as it may, I'd probably still be working and doing much of the same things I do now and trying to live with what was happening to my town while still loving my "place."
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