:Vocalo.org

By Christopher C. Hedges

I moved around a lot as a kid.

My dad was in the military, so we moved every three or four years. By the time I was in high school and finally settled into life in Bloomington, Indiana, I had lived in Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky and New Jersey. My dad once had an assignment to go to Japan – I remember getting a bunch of shots and reading a Japanese phrase book when I was in elementary school – but we ended up not having to go overseas. It's too bad because I was looking forward to being able to tell my friends I had been some place outside of the United States since most Army brats had spent sometime in Germany.

I was playing around with Google Maps the other day and was exploring the area where I had spent the bulk of my childhood growing up. We moved to a military base in Northern New Jersey when I was in the first grade and lived in the area until I was a freshman in high school. While I don't consider the area where we lived in New Jersey to be my home town, it is the area that probably influenced me the most because it was where I spent my formative years.

Locating the various landmarks of my childhood brought back memories. The old house where we moved after my dad retired from the military was still visible in the satellite photographs. I could see the river where we used to swim and fish in the summer. I could trace the streets I walked to get to elementary school. While we rode the bus in bad weather, it is those walks with a bunch of kids that stand out in my memories.

If we weren't walking around town, we were riding our BMX bikes exploring and trying to see how far we could ride without getting to far away from home. I remember riding on summer day with my brother and a friend from our town to the mall in a neighboring town. It had to have been a two-hour ride, but it was great fun just to be able to go some place without needing a ride from our parents. I can taste the pizza from the local pizza place that was a five minute walk from the house – I don't think any pizza I've had since can live up to the memories of buying a slice of pizza with friends after school.

I want to go back one of these days to see the old neighborhood. I haven't kept in touch with anyone, so I'm not necessarily interested in finding anyone I once knew. I just want to see how things have changed and what has stayed the same. I want to explore the streets I once wondered when I had no responsibility except to get home before the street lights came on and to finish my homework.

Maybe I'm looking for a home town – one that I never had because we moved so much when I was a kid. I know I'll never find it.