Addresses

Yes, the physical ones, yet emails probably have the same effect, as do phone numbers. For the sake of this piece, addresses.

What’s the first address you remember? Can you visualize the home? The smell? How many steps to each door? Hiding places? Memories?

I’ve been devouring memoirs and there are many commonalities between rockstars, tech CEOs, and the infamous, addresses. At this house, this happened. At this house, I learned this. This house had good memories, while another did not.

The more I learn, the more certain songs hit differently, and each address almost has its own soundtrack. It’s easy to say it’s by the decade, however if you think about college, that was four years, and the many apartments over the course of one-year leases…almost each address has its own song.

As I am writing this while charging my wife’s Tesla in a parking lot, Why Don’t You Get a Job? by The Offspring is playing. 8th grade. Richland.

Next song, Close to Me by The Cure. The address: a relative’s house in Bartlett, summers outside Chicago. My cousin would sit me down on the bed and tell me all about music, spirits, life. I cherish those memories. The smells, the sounds…address.

I walk around life extremely grateful. I was fortunate to grow up around positivity.

With almost all of my friends and family now on the parenting side of life, and while I did not have kids of my own, how do I show up to give these kids a sense of possibility? The confidence to play their own game of life?

I think back to the address in El Cerrito, when we lived with my uncle for a bit. The gatherings, informal and formal. We didn’t know the house was small, or that three adults and 2.5 kids were essentially living on top of each other in 1,300 square feet.

Today? We think we have to go bigger. Why? Because when we have guests stay over, that’s the popular notion.

I calculated this: only 31 days were either of our two guest rooms occupied by friends or family.

The cost of that extra carrying cost of the mortgage? I could put them in the Arizona Biltmore and still have money left over for a down payment on a house in Europe—France, Italy, exploring Spain and now Portugal.

Living in close proximity to friends and family (walking distance) is by far the greatest life hack I’ve discovered.

That proximity is also very hard to pull off, because everyone has their own life, which is not my life. I’ve learned that.

Not a day goes by I don’t talk about Seattle. From my 20s, 30s, till today, 40s.

There was a solid decade where family and friends lived within feet of each other. Feet.

I bet if you asked them when life was the most fun, all would say that decade.

Unknowingly, at the time, we were living the best life.

Random sightings of each other. Coffee runs. Happy hours. Leftovers. Dinners. Parties.

That Seattle address, with so much life lived, now feels like the town you left after high school. There is a fondness, but you mentally try to block that you’d ever go back.

Weirdly, you leave the door cracked ever so slightly.

It was a simpler time.