So many places, but eventually you settle down and find a home

In one of the opening scenes in the wonderful 1943 movie "The Human Comedy," a 5-year-old boy living in California's San Joaquin Valley is watching a train go by when he sees a black man riding on one of the passing cars.

The man waves to him and says, "Going home, boy. Going back where I belong."

In 1943, his home in Kentucky was much farther from California than it is now. Passenger flights were only for the wealthy, and trains took much longer and were mostly used for military transport.

Of course, people didn't travel as far from home as they do now. Millions of Americans lived their entire lives within a hundred miles of where they were born. And without television, the only view most people had of far-off places was what they got from the movies.

When I was growing up in Ohio in the late 1950s, my grandparents lived 120 miles away. But in those days before superhighways and even bypasses around most towns, it took us three hours to get there. Other than yearly trips to New York to see our other grandparents, our life was very Ohio-centric.

Until it wasn't.

Home

When I was 13, we moved from Ohio to Virginia because my Dad got a promotion. He went to work at the Pentagon and we moved into a very nice house in Fairfax, Va.

I lived there through my teens and the first half of my 20s, and until about 10 years ago, it was the house I had lived in longer than any other.

Two of my four siblings still live within a half hour of there. My brother is the smart one. He has spent pretty much his whole life living in the D.C. area but has a job that lets him travel all around the world.

Another sister lives in Ohio, and a third lives just outside Boston.

All four of them have towns they call home. I have three different places I have lived for at least 10 years and I'm working on a fourth. I have three others where I basically lived for at least two years. There was Ohio from 1953-63, Virginia from 1963-76 and 78-81 and California from 1990-2010.

Those places had the greatest influence in shaping my life, but the other three mattered too. Two years in Austria, 30 months in St. Louis and two years in Colorado.

Sweet home

If I have a regret, it's that we didn't stay in the house where Nicole and I raised our children. We still owed a lot on our mortgage and we had pretty much always realized that if we wanted to retire comfortably, we were going to have to sell our California home and buy one somewhere else.

So we have a wonderful home in Georgia that was brand new when we moved in. Three bedrooms, two full baths, an office, a sun room and a sound system that plays music all over the house.

God willing, it will be my home for the rest of my life, but when you don't live someplace until you're past your 60th birthday, the memories are far more limited. It's hundreds of miles from the ballfields where I played as a kid, and several thousands of miles from the golf courses where I spent nearly 20 years playing with my friends Mickey and Chuck.

The house is all ours, no mortgage. God willing, it's the last place we'll ever live. Our children won't be able to visit us in a house where they have memories, but people matter more than places.

For me, home is where Nicole is.

Always will be.