Milestone?

For those of you keeping score at home, it was 30 years ago, more or less to this day, that I first moved to Atlanta, Georgia. Early February, 1981.

Prior to the move, I had been living in Boston and teaching high school in Salem, Massachusetts, famous for its 17th Century witch trials (the football team was called the Salem Witches). I shared a small apartment in the city with my grad school girlfriend and would have to get up every morning at 5:15, take a streetcar to a train to a bus to get to Salem, and then I wouldn't get home again until well after 6:00 pm. I found out that I didn't have the patience and whatever it is that teachers have that let's them prosper at their job, and I was generally miserable. Oh, and the salary was only $14,000 per year, a ridiculously small wage even by 1981 standards and the reason why I had to take public transportation to work rather than drive a car of my own.

But still, I thought that the sun rose and set over the Boston Basin, I thought that Mary Ellen was destined to be my life mate, and I figured that if I could just ride out the school year, I would find a "real job" during the summer break.

And then the phone rang.

Unsolicited, I received a telephone call from a former BU grad student who had worked his way into a management position at the Georgia Geologic Survey, and was calling recent grads such as myself to recruit them to the Survey's expanding Hydrology Program. Radium Springs in South Georgia had gone dry during an extended drought, and the Governor, wanting to look like he was doing something about the matter, increased the funding for the Geologic Survey in order to investigate the state's groundwater resources. They were paying $17,000 a year.

I took the job and jumped contract on the teaching position, which reverted to the substitute teacher who probably should have been given the job in the first place.

The only things that I knew about Atlanta at that time was that someone was apparently mass murdering young black boys (the "missing and murdered children" case), the new mayor was Andrew Young, Carter's former U.N. Ambassador (who I later got to meet when he took an executive position at an engineering firm I worked at 10 years later), and Burt Reynolds was considered a pretty big deal (he was shooting the film Sharky's Machine in the city at that time).

I didn't want to leave Mary Ellen, but I convinced myself that she would eventually come down and join me in Atlanta (naturally, she didn't), and that after I got one or two years of experience at the Survey under my belt, I could move back to Boston for a better job.

That didn't happen either. As it turns out, I worked for a little over three years at the Geologic Survey before joining that engineering firm where I would later meet Andrew Young. In 1986, five years after moving to Atlanta, I helped the engineering firm open a new office in Albany, NY, where I spent six cold and rather unsatisfying years. I transferred to the Pittsburgh office at the beginning of 1993 just to get a little more urban of a lifestyle, but the economy was so poor then that we had to shut the office down before the year was over and I moved back to a bigger and more crowded Atlanta, where I've been ever since.

Mary Ellen went off to study at the Sorbonne for a year and then returned to Boston; I haven't heard from her since 1982. A later Governor eventually shut down the Georgia Geologic Survey as part of a budget-saving measure, and that engineering firm got bought up by an even larger company. From what I understand, it's still cold in Albany and the economy's still fragile in Pittsburgh. Me, I've been calling Atlanta my home, for better or worse, since 1993 (this time around), or since 1981 (cumulative).

I don't know if there's a point to any of this. The psychedelic British rock band Pink Floyd once sang, "The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime." The British post-punk band Gang of Four countered with "Nostalgia, it's no good. It is not enough. It is just a habit."

It is just a habit.