Small Town Boy... Big City Dreams

"Keep your money in your shoe, and don't look anyone in the eye." That was the advice my mother gave me the night before I boarded the plane to travel to New York City for the first time. My mother could not understand my excitement. She had always been completely content with her simple small-town existence. Everything she desired or needed could be found in her own backyard. That contentment was something I had not known for a long time. It was in my adolescent years that I first became aware of a hunger that my life in Western South Dakota would never be able to satisfy. It was my first visit to New York City which finally gave a life to that hunger, and it was the sweet voice of that hunger which eventually called me to leave the Black Hills of South Dakota and to make my home in the San Francisco Bay Area.


The city has a heartbeat. It has an electrical buzz, a surging energy that awakens the senses. For those who have lived the greatest share of their lives in metropolitan areas, the electricity of the city may be too commonplace to be discerned. For me, it was a drug, and like a child tasting candy for the first time, I wanted more. For ten days, I did things I had only heard about or read about. I was attending a conference and was being housed on the campus of Columbia University. At night, I would ride the subway to Broadway, eat in an ethnic restaurant because the food was cheaper and nothing like the food I could get back home, and take in a show. Before returning to the dormitory where I was staying, I would go to the West End, once a hangout for the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, for a beer or two. I fell asleep to the sounds of taxis and people on the streets.


In the city, I was a different man. I was more alive somehow, awakened with possibility. Every day I saw glimpses of the person I could be, the person I was becoming. I noticed my pace as I walked the city streets had changed. It had quickened; I was becoming a part of this unique life force. And although I did not understand the sum total of the impact this trip had on my life in that moment, I knew that I was no longer the same man who had boarded the plane ten days earlier. I had lived my entire life knowing that the world was a much bigger place than I could even imagine. I was starved for culture and diversity, for the arts--music, theatre, books, ideas. I wanted more than the homogenized sepia-toned existence of the Great Plains. More than that, I needed more. I needed to be inspired by life, and now I knew that I could be. I had experienced life in living color. I suddenly knew what I was missing.


None of us know when the wake-up call will come. We become complacent in our lives, accepting the status quo because it is comfortable or because we are too afraid to make a change. My life in South Dakota was a long goodbye which began the moment I discovered my love for art, music, theatre, and diversity. My farewell was bittersweet. I left behind the Black Hills and prairie, trading them for a view of the bay. I said goodbye to my family and followed my heart to place which has become home. There are moments when I long for the home and the landscape I once knew. I miss the mountains and the farmland and ranches which stretch on for miles. I miss the people whose simple way of life and whose values have shaped who I am. I miss my family and my friends, those people who are most dear to me. When the longing comes, I answer it and in this I have found a most unusual paradox. Home looks most beautiful when approached from a distance.