"In Oklahoma, Not Arizona, What Does it Matter"...

When people ask me where I'm from, I have an annoying tendency to change my story a bit based on whatever version of the ever elusive "(T)ruth I happen to be in the mood to adhere to. And the fact that I feel the need to launch into an explanation of my geographically challenged upbringing rather than simply saying "I'm from _____." is probably worth further investigation by a competent therapist. But I digress...

In a conversation the other day with several other people at a post-graduation party, out of boredom perhaps, we did the whole "Where are you from?" round robin (which was followed by the much more fun "What's your favorite movie?" discussion). Someone said, "You're from here, right?" And I replied, "Yes, we were here until I was seven and then we moved to the Dallas area, and I was there for about twenty years." And then someone else said, definitively, "I don't count anything before the age of thirteen." Then the person who had originally asked the question mentioned she had grown up in about three different states. All of this led me to the conclusion that the question of where one is "from" is one of the most confusing questions there is.

We all come up with some reasonable explanation for why we do or do not "count" certain places we have lived as having a claim on us, as if we wish to deny those places any part in forming our identities. For example, even though I will, to avoid further discussion, tell people I'm from Beaumont when asked, the truth is much trickier. Here's the cold hard math on where I've lived:

Age 0-6 weeks--Dallas
Age 6 weeks--7 years--Hampshire Fannett, Beaumont
Age 7-8--Dallas
Age 8-9--Richardson
Age 9-19--Garland
Age 19-21--Denton
Age 21-22--Stephenville
Age 23-27--Denton
Age--27-28--Garland
Age--29-?--Beaumont

And here's my interpretation of those facts...

Yes, perhaps it is ludicrous to claim that one is from a place if she only lived there the first sevel years of her life. BUT--no place has ever had a hold on my soul the way Beaumont did. No place ever beat me up the way Beaumont did. No place ever (and could ever in the future) give me the incredible formative experiences Beaumont did. For example: I fed alligators at the Boondocks here. I learned to swim here. I learned to read here. I learned to write here, for God's sake. My entire family (both sides) is from Beaumont. My parents met here as teenagers. So there's always been a sense of Beaumont being the root of who I am, no matter where else I went.

Strangely, from the time we moved to Dallas until the time I moved back to southeast Texas in 2006, I hated Beaumont. My forward thinking mother trained me to tell people I was from Dallas pretty much from the time we arrived there. Beaumont was supposed to be tucked away into a distant memory where, well, where we keep all our memories of economically depressed refinery towns we don't want to admit we've lived in. And so it was--I pretended I had never heard of Beaumont until 2005, when I saw a job posting at Lamar University, and suddenly then I began to feel I could tolerate the endless humidity and rain in exchange for employment.

No matter where else I lived (and Garland is clearly where I spent most of my time from age 9-29), I was simply "there"--not really a part of the fabric of the place, just kind of a resident who was formed, in personality and spirit, by another home. And I can tell now when I go back to Dallas or Garland that the cities quitely closed up around me and went on about their business after I left, just as Beaumont opened up to let me back in.

So, in concluding, I'm not sure what the point of this post is, other than to illustrate that for me, the question of where I'm from is not simple at all. And, in order to tie this into my profession, I am wondering what kind of interesting expository essay assignment could come from this kind of self-centered, navel-gazing rumination.

Oh, and thanks to Three Dog Night for the post title, because I couldn't think of one on my own.