Leaving Beverly Hills

A couple of months ago I wrote a post that was inspired by Steve Jobs when he discussed the two or three most important things he had ever done in his life.  Taking LSD was one of them, as he stated in several interviews.  In my prior post I wrote about saying "yes" to an offer to learn how to ski with Uncle Gale, a life long family friend, on a winter morning in 1997 in Michigan.  It was one of the two or three most important things I'd ever done in my life and opened a lot of doors for me.  Time to discuss another one of those two or three most important things.  And that is moving out of my hometown.

Before I go any further, let me just say this; I love my hometown.  Beverly Hills, Michigan was a really cool place to grow up.  It shaped who I am and I have a lot of good memories from my childhood.  Beverly Hills is a suburb about twenty minutes northwest of Detroit.  Detroit itself was a thriving city in the 1940s when the automobile industry was booming.  The demand for industrial workers was high.  With all these manufacturing jobs being created, people poured into Detroit.  Black families moved there from the South.  People migrated from the Middle East, Mexico, and Europe, all looking for solid, good paying work.  The city was an economic powerhouse that was putting people to work.  Detroit's population peaked at 1.8 million people in 1950.  Sadly, the American auto industry crashed, manufacturing jobs were cut, poverty and crime became the new normal, and many Detroit residents fled.  Between 1950 and 2022, Detroit's population declined by sixty-five percent.  My parents and their families were among the many people who left the city in the 1960s and moved to the suburbs.  Despite having struggled with high crime for several years, Detroit, along with it's surrounding suburbs, has a rich cultural history.  Faygo soda is manufactured in Detroit and is common in most households in the area.  I definitely drank my share of Faygo root beer as a kid.  The Detroit style hot dog is the Coney Island hot dog, which includes mustard, chili sauce, and diced onions.  The Coney Island hot dog was actually first served in Brooklyn, but during the 1940s, a wave of Greeks and Albanians moved to Detroit from New York City and their respective home countries.  Once in Michigan, they opened several restaurants in the area serving traditional Greek food and Coney Island hot dogs.  Detroit soon adopted the Coney Island as it's signature hot dog, and these restaurants are a staple of Detroit culture.  They are known locally as Coney Island restaurants.  I worked at one for three years during my high school days starting when I was fourteen.  Detroit also has it's own style of pizza.  It's a large rectangle, inspired by Sicilian style pizza, and cut into smaller rectangles.  The bottom part of the crust is crispy underneath, the crust is about three quarters of an inch thick, and is fluffy and soft in the middle with all the usual fixings on top.  Although Detroit sports teams haven't given us much to be excited about in the last several years, Detroiters are loyal and devoted to their teams.  I myself grew up a big Red Wings fan.  They are, after all, one of the original six NHL teams, so a lot of history there.  Detroit and it's surrounding suburbs are inspiring places and I wouldn't be who I am if I grew up somewhere else.

Throughout my childhood I was never a bad kid, but I was kind of a little shit sometimes.  As I progressed through my adolescence, I realized more and more that I didn't quite fit in.  As much as I liked my hometown, there came a point in high school where I realized that I had to get out.  I wanted more.  I wanted to experience another place.  And that other place was California.  I had visited the golden state a handful of times during my youth to visit my dad's side of the family.  I liked it quite a bit and felt like I belonged there.  I knew it would be good for me and I knew that's where I needed to go.  During my senior year of high school it became my number one long term goal.  I was going to go to college in Michigan, get my degree, then do whatever it took to get to California and create a life out there.  That goal stuck with me all throughout college.  Not a day went by when I didn't think about it.  To make that goal more achievable, I even told people in college that I was born in California and moved to Michigan as a kid, implying that I had California roots.  Looking back now, it's pretty silly that I did that, but in the scheme of things, it was just a small part of my past that I invented to make my dream seem more realistic.     

On an early April morning in 2009 I was standing outside near the entrance of our two story office building in Southfield Township, Michigan trading banter with my co-workers at the time.  There were only eight of us working in our small satellite law office.  We often ate lunch and took morning and afternoon breaks together.  Since a few members of our team were smokers, part of the morning and afternoon breaks were spent outside.  I was a cigarette smoker for a year and a half during my college days, but I ditched them after graduation.  Even though it had been several months since I quit, I still enjoyed stepping outside for a few minutes during the day.  Winter and the holiday season had passed, the snow had melted, and the days were slowly warming up in anticipation of Spring.  When I returned to my desk with a fresh cup of coffee, I noticed that I had a voicemail on my office phone.  My missed calls menu flashed the name of one of the partners who was based out of the firm's headquarters in Chicago.  I was hoping that this was the call I had been waiting for as I played the voicemail.  It was.  He was giving me the news that a position had opened up in the Chicago office that he thought would be a great fit for me and said it was mine if I was interested.  

The position I was currently holding was a full time job that had decent pay, but it was far from ideal.  It was a data entry position that paid hourly and didn't offer any benefits.  I graduated from Western Michigan University and earned a Bachelor's degree in finance nine months earlier.  When I was ready to enter the job market in July of 2008, the world was knee deep in what came to be known as the Great Recession.  Michigan was especially hit hard.  My mother had passed away in late 2005 and my dad attempted to sell our family house in the fall of 2008.  The deal fell through because his perspective buyer was unexpectedly laid off from her job and therefore didn't qualify for the mortgage.  These were tough times.  But I did the only thing I knew how to do during tough times; I didn't waste time feeling sorry for myself and instead I found a way to work through it.  Life is 5% what happens to you and 95% how you react to it.  Unfortunately I didn't have the luxury of holding out for a positing that was a good fit for my background and degree.  I needed to get to work, and quickly.  So when I landed this data entry gig at a small law office right in my hometown, I took it.  I could always look for a job that was a better fit, but for now, I needed to get to work.  I began this position shortly after graduating and returning to my hometown.  I liked my routine of going to work Monday through Friday and being in an office environment.  I had also developed a close relationship with my co-workers.  I knew I wanted more though.  When that voicemail discussing the opportunity to move to Chicago and take a gig at the headquarters arrived, the idea had been in the works for some time.  I traveled to Chicago back in February to meet with upper management and the partners about new opportunities.  It was a good, productive day of meetings and they said they'd stay in touch as opportunities came up.  The time had finally come.  Two days before my twenty-third birthday, I loaded up my car with as many belongings as I could cram in there, left my hometown, and headed to Chicago.  I knew, the moment I pulled out of my dad's driveway, that my life was never going to be the same from that day forward.  

The opportunity proved to be a good one.  The pay was higher, it offered benefits, and offered new challenges.  Even though it was a similar role to the one I had in Michigan, it gave me an opportunity to have more of an impact.  Meanwhile, the firm's Accounting department was developing a new role, which I took a few months after arriving in Chicago and held for the next two and a half years.  This was a big change to undertake.  It was very positive, but also overwhelming.  I left behind my hometown, a suburban village near Detroit of roughly 10,000 people.  Even though the Detroit area had and still has a measure of cultural diversity, the village I grew up in was ninety percent white. I was always kind of a rebel, but I was used to a certain way of life.  Most people in my hometown had spent their whole lives there and were third and fourth generation Michiganders.  With 2.7 million residents, Chicago it is the third largest city by population in the United States, and the largest in the Midwest.  I was "not in Kansas anymore" so to speak.  My college town of Kalamazoo, where I spent four years, was a different kind of place, but not like Chicago.  There's a scene in the Will Ferrell holiday movie "Elf" where his character, Buddy the Elf, arrives in New York City from the North Pole.  He goes around saying hi to random people who are hailing cabs, and bursts into a hole-in-the-wall café to congratulate the staff on serving "the world's best cup of coffee".  His actions were either ignored or met with puzzled responses from unsuspecting New Yorkers.  That scene is a caricature of how I was when I first arrived in Chicago.   I was used to life in my suburban snow globe of a world.  When I walked to the subway train stop from my studio apartment in the morning on my way to work, I would nod or say hi to people who walked past me on the sidewalk.  I was usually ignored.  One day I was waiting for the train when a guy walked by me and noticed my Tigers hat.  "Man, you're going to get punched in the back of the head for wearing that hat, bro".  I couldn't tell if his comment was made in jest or if he was being confrontational.  I laughed and said "I guess I need a Cubbies hat, huh?"  He offered neither a smile nor a frown. "you need a Sox hat" he replied.  He seemed to be one of those older Southside Chicago "tough" guys who took sports rivalries way to seriously.  I laughed again and told him "okay, have a good one".  His response was a shoulder length wave, as he continued walking.  That was my first real glimpse into the Chicago/Detroit sports rivalry.  I was accustomed to in state sports rivalries back in Michigan, but they were always friendly rivalries in my experience.  Chicago vs. Detroit was different.  Even so, I wore my Red Wings and Tigers gear all around the city proudly until the day I moved to California.  After about a month, I was dating a girl I had met through mutual friends.  We were having a conversation one day during lunch at a local crepe restaurant about how her thirty-three year old friend didn't have any kids and had never been married.  Of course I wouldn't think twice about that now, but at the time, I remember thinking that was strange.  Most thirty-three year old people in my hometown were married with at least one kid.  My date, who had been living in the city for quite some time and was accustomed to the way of life, gave me some crap for having that mindset.  And rightfully so.  It proved how much I didn't know about the world outside of my suburban hometown and how much I had to learn.

After overcoming the culture shock, I learned quite a bit about the way of life in a big city, adjusted to my surroundings, and blended in more with the crowd.  I loved every moment of it, despite the mishaps.  I was constantly learning.  I was introduced to people from all kinds of different backgrounds.  People who grew up in the city, people from the suburbs, people who had come to Chicago from Kenya, Italy, India, Bosnia, Romania, Ukraine, and countless other places.  I was introduced to different foods and cuisines.  I listened to people's stories and learned some valuable life lessons.  I joined a running group for the first time.  I grew very fond of my city life routine of walking to the subway in the morning, taking the fifteen minute train ride to my office across the street from the Willis Tower, and coming home to my own studio apartment, and later on, the flat that I shared with two roommates in the Wicker Park neighborhood.  I was also exposed to some not so pleasant things, like the ever present entertainment of riding public transportation in a big city.  Nothing bad ever happened to me, but I witnessed some potentially dangerous situations.  I was also asked for spare change on an almost daily basis by homeless folks.  It was alarming and sad to see how many people in Chicago were without homes, and I helped when I could.  

Even though I was having a good time in Chicago, my mind was somewhere else.  I had still not given up on my California dream.  Chicago was never meant to be place where I would plant roots.  It was simply a stop along the way.  Eventually the day came when it was time to live out my dream and say goodbye to my life in Chicago and hello to my new life in Los Angeles.  It wasn't easy.  I had developed a good circle of friends in Chicago and I liked my job working in the Accounting department of the law firm I started at in Michigan.  But I knew moving to California was the right move.  I had known for many years.  It was finally time to go where I belonged.  LA is also a big city, but it wasn't like Chicago.  It had a completely different vibe.  Again, I knew that the moment I stepped off the plane at LAX, that life as I knew it would never be the same.  Unlike the move from Michigan to Chicago, this time I was smarter, I had already been away from home for a while, and I was more accustomed to big city life.  The change wasn't as drastic, but it was much more exciting. I was introduced to even more diversity, more ways of life, more foods and cuisines, etc.  One of the most significant changes I experienced was the natural setting. California had mountains.  Being from Michigan, my experience of hiking was going on a walk on a flat trail through the woods.  Hiking in California meant climbing up mountain trails with fantastic views from the summit.  Soon I was introduced to mountain trails and I was snowboarding down real mountains at thousands of feet of altitude.  These experiences paved the way for me to expand my running from the road to the trails and eventually from marathon running to ultramarathon running.  And as any ultrarunner knows, transitioning from road marathon running to trail ultrarunning is like stepping into a whole other dimension.  It didn't stop there.  With my most recent move four years ago from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, my mind really opened up to tech culture and politics.  

I'm now in my twelfth year of living in California.  Going from Beverly Hills, Michigan to Chicago, to LA, to the Bay Area has been quite the journey.  I've been forever changed by the experience.  All the things I've gone through, the people I've met, and the highs and lows that life has thrown at me along the way have allowed me to evolve in ways that never would have been possible if I hadn't left my hometown.  That's why leaving my hometown was one of the two or three most important things I've ever done.  I will say though it's been quite a while since I've visited.  The last time I made an appearance in Beverly Hills was February 2020 right before the pandemic.  I think it's time to plan another visit.