PCS Breakfast Club

Day 335. You can take the girl outta the library…

My Harvard Business Review Weekly Hotlist email arrived today. The lead article represents one of those marvelous serendipitous collisions between my imagination and technology. Data mining happens constantly, I know, but surely mind reading is a few years off yet. Moving Around Without Losing Your Roots is one of the big ideas I was digesting along with breakfast so I got a bit of a jolt when I read the article title.

I enjoy reading HBR because the writing is excellent and so many of the topics are relevant to everyone, not just high-level executives. There’s a lot of intelligent, thoughtful discussion about communication, which is the basis of every relationship and is of particular interest to me.

I took a quick break from my other morning reading material, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe to check my email. My copy of the book hails from the Strand Book Store in New York. My natural inclination is to write “from the Strand, in the City” because I am first, foremost, and always a New Yorker. A big chunk of my heart lives there and I have fond memories of the dirty old City of the late 70s. Almost all of my friends and anyone from the Tri-State Area would know immediately that “the City” I mean is New York but many people would not.

I am most accurately a Long Islander, not a Manhattanite or a local of the other four boroughs. I was an actual resident of Manhattan only briefly; I wasn’t born and bred there. Unless you happen to be a linguist you might not even suspect that I’m from New York at all. New York City is simply the first place where I began to be which is why it feels like home to me.

This attachment to a place I briefly called home is one of the few but fundamental commonalities I share with other military dependents. Aside from my military acquaintances I’ve lived in more places than anyone I know. If home is where the heart is, I’ve got lots of homes. I wouldn’t want it any other way.