At the intersection of legacy and choice

2014 was a year that marked a number of remarkable firsts for me, but one surely stands out in my life:  it was the first year of my entire existence that passed without a single day spent in the state of Florida, my home state.  Early tomorrow morning will end the longest running period of my extra-Florida existence - at least for now - and it has brought me to consider the extraordinarily peculiar intersection of my legacy - i.e., those things over which I yield no control - and my choice.  That's an intersection which is not nearly as clear cut as I thought it was about half a decade ago.

Like most Americans, my family is defined by folks who spend their entire lives within a 50-mile radius of the place where they entered this world.  In the case of my mom, that would have meant Bowling Green, Kentucky, a somnolent but thriving neo-industrial college town (e.g., all Chevy Corvettes have been manufactured there since 1981) where the rolling hills of the Upper South à la Nashville begin to encounter the endless prairies of the Lower Midwest à la Indianapolis.  Like much of Middle America, it is the type of place where folks only rarely escape to write their life stories in radically different venues; indeed, an overwhelmingly majority - nearly all - of my family still lies within a 5-hour drive of that area.  The reasons behind my mother's eventual move to the Florida Panhandle in the early 1980's (as briefly chronicled above in her journal entry above from March 1985) are both entirely known to me and still somewhat nebulous in my mind; with her no longer here to fully walk me through her reasoning, there's a crucial part of her decision making that will be forever unknown to history.

Regardless, I grew up as a Floridian - in an incredibly tiny town even more intransigent in its migration patterns than her hometown of Bowling Green.  Anybody who knows me, knows that I hated the rural environs in which I was raised and always, from my youngest days, longed for something far more significant. And partially through the vagaries of chance with which we all must contend, partially through an unblemished record of straight "A" grades and high standardized test scores, I earned the escape from that environment which I desperately desired.  I earned my way to the Ivy League and management in Corporate America.  Short of migrating here from an impoverished rural region of a developing country, it is hard for me to imagine how my urbanized life today in Manhattan could be any more different than my life a mere ten years ago in rural Northern Florida.

That's the outcome largely of the narrative of choice, of which my story of rejection - mentioned quite a few times before on this blog - is a significant part.  Indeed, I saw the value system that was prevalent around me in my youth, rejected it by choice, and I ended up where I am today.  That portion of my life is very simple to understand.

But if that were all there was to it, there would be no reason that I am somewhat happy to be landing in Orlando tomorrow morning.  Indeed, Orlando is unquestionably among my least favorite larger cities in Florida, after perhaps only (Deep Southern and paper mill-polluted in character) Jacksonville.  If I were truly a New Yorker who has evolved into a world traveler - bathing in the sun in locales ranging from Santa Monica, California to Nice, France to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - as I indeed have done - a mere 3-hour flight to Orlando would be purely insignificant to me.

 But it is not.

Because as much as I may be proudly defined by the narrative of choice, so I am irrefutably shaped by the narrative of legacy.  When my plane lands at MCO tomorrow morning, my mind will certainly run back to the days in August 2005 when I first met some of my best friends on the University of Florida campus less than two hours to the north, as an 18-year old freshman honors student.  Those cached memories of my 50-year old mom and I sweating our asses off moving things into my Hume Hall dorm during the dead heat of a Florida summer will resurface.  I will remember staying up all night playing Super Smash Brothers with my best friend in high school, and in fact one of my very few friends at that time.  I will remember my first time walking through Disney World as a young child, amazed that this magical place was so close to my home.  I will remember the invigorating thrill of swimming in  the Atlantic off Miami Beach shortly after the New Year in January 2010, after a long year finishing grad school in brutally frigid Pittsburgh.  I will remember living in South Florida and having my first experiences as a management consultant; my first experiences as a true adult in the workforce; and taking my first steps into the real world without any parental guidance as I walked outside of my Plantation, Florida condo to pick up The Miami Herald in the morning while morning coffee brewed.  And profoundly, I will remember taking the stage in front of blinding camera lights at the Peabody Hotel on International Drive in this very city - Orlando - 13 years ago as a high school freshman back in 2002 after having won a statewide Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) competition in Computer Networking, on the way to winning that same FBLA competition nationally later in the summer in Tennessee.  I will remember giving interviews shortly after that to The Orlando Sentinel and The Calhoun County Record - and for this first time, understanding the supremacy of the narrative of choice over the narrative of legacy in a free country like the USA.

Indeed, in these divided times I must remind some that it is the supremacy of choice over legacy - not the absolute reign.  I am proudly a New Yorker by adult choice, but proudly a Floridian by birth, and irrefutably a product of the choices my mom made to lay out the world in front of me.  In a free society our choice is the most supreme element of our being, but our adult choices should never convey a sense of incontrovertible moral supremacy as they are never made in a vacuum shielded from our childhood years.  Neither one of those factors should be forever superseded by the other.  The splash of warm, salty water on the beach will always invigorate in me a certain underlying passion, as does the sight of the Manhattan skyline.  Neither are supreme.  Both are a result of the beautiful intersection of legacy and choice, reconciled as an adult.

My mom, till her death, always maintained a profound reverence for Kentucky, ensuring that I visit her home state at least once per year.  I asked her many times - why did you leave behind a place that you clearly cherish so dearly?  One of her few faults is that she could never provide me with a clear moral answer to that question when I raised it.  If I do one day have kids, I hope that they never ask me the same questions about Florida without a fair response.