Volume 5, Issue 18: Members Only

"I don't know about you, but ever since we found this place, I catch myself fantasizing about this."

Here is a button where you can subscribe to this newsletter now, if you have not previously done so. I do hope that you enjoy it.

Next month, I will have lived in Athens, Georgia for 11 years. It is the third-longest number of years I have lived in one city.

• Mattoon, Illinois: 17 1/2 years

• New York, New York: 13 1/2 years.

• Athens, Georgia: 11 years.

• Champaign, Illinois: 4 years.

• St. Louis, Missouri: 1 1/2 years.

• Los Angeles, California: 1 year.

I’m visiting Los Angeles this coming week, and I will see my lifelong friend and podcast partner Tim Grierson. This month, it will be 31 years since we graduated from high school together, when we left everything we had ever known behind and started entirely new adventures in entirely new places. Tim went to the University of Southern California after he graduated and has lived in Los Angeles since, which means he has only lived in two cities: Mattoon, and LA, two cities that do not, uh, have much in common. His life has a clear dividing line: The small town he grew up in, and the huge city he became an adult in and will presumably live for the rest of his life.

What I remember most about our senior year of high school—my final year in the town where still to this day, at the age of 48, I have lived in longer than any other—is desperately wanting to leave. Some people who grow up in small towns want to leave because they find the sensibility oppressive, or even actively hostile; their goal is simply escape. But this is not why I wanted to leave my hometown. I love my hometown. Most of my family still lives there, the house my father built to raise his family in still stands there, when I’m in town I can’t go anywhere without running into someone I know. It remains the only place where it feels like I can catch my breath, a place I can slow things down for a little bit, get my bearings, clear my head—the place that does and always will feel the most like home. It has been 2 1/2 years since I’ve was last in Mattoon—the longest I have gone since I was born—and I feel that absence palpably, as if everything’s a little unbalanced and unsteady. I’m headed back there in August, a trip I’m counting down the days until, something I’m considering less a visit to where I used to live and more like a realignment—a check-in to make sure I can continue to keep this vehicle on the road.

I come by this naturally. A few years ago, a friend of mine was skiing in Utah. She took a day off to look up her family history at one of the Mormon genealogy sites out there, knew I’d always been curious about my family history and whether it was more than just “Midwestern” and looked it up for me while she was there. She called me, astounded. “I traced you back to the early 1800s,” she said. “You know where your great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather was from? He was from Mattoon.” We are not people who leave.

But I wanted to leave, couldn’t wait to leave. And that’s because I wanted to see what else the planet had to offer. The place I lived inherently felt small, not because it was a small town, but because it wasn’t the whole world. I wanted to see the whole world, and where I fit in it. So I left. I’ve been on the wildly bucking horse of adulthood since.

A friend of mine here in Athens grew up in a military family, so he moved around constantly as a kid. This led him to put down roots at the earliest opportunity: Once he bought a house in Athens, he decided he was never leaving, and he hasn’t. He’s hoping his kids stay in Athens, go to school at the University of Georgia and are nearby for the rest of everybody’s lives. He wanted a home as an adult because he never felt like he had one as a child. He wanted to have a place where he knows everyone and everyone knows him. He wanted to have a place that was his.

I admire this, and certainly understand it. I grew up with that very thing. That I ultimately rejected it, that I knew I needed more, was the correct decision: I am happy with how it has turned out, and obviously I wouldn’t have had the opportunities, professional, personal, emotional, that I’ve had if I had never left Mattoon. But it is unusual, I think, to be 48 years old and have lived in three different cities for longer than a decade. It makes you a sort of permanent interloper. I’ll never feel like a Mattoonian because I’ve been gone for more than 30 years. I’ll never feel like a New Yorker because I didn’t grew up there and ultimately left. And I’ll never feel like an Athenian because I didn’t even arrive here, a place people tend to live their entire lives, and for good reason (this place is great), until I was in my late 30s. It makes one feel like a perpetual outsider, or more accurately an on-the-ground observer: A witness to your community, but not an ingrained, roots-down intrinsic part of it. You are from somewhere, but, often, of nothing.

This seems, increasingly, like a widespread national condition. More and more Americans have been moving in recent years, often out of rural areas (like Mattoon) to more urban areas (like New York, Los Angeles or even, by the definition, Athens). The notion of staying in one general area—once popular and even, when and where I grew up, axiomatic, almost religious—has gone out of style, for many reasons, from financial to geopolitical to educational. I think this is leading to many more people who have had a similar experience to me, to feel like they are constantly making new homes and joining new communities while still having a certain dull ache of longing for a place you are intimately familiar with. I wonder if this is just part of the human condition: Wanting to have new experiences while lamenting to have to let go of all you’ve ever known. A desire to find a place to belong while always feeling, when you find one, like you’re a visitor who will never truly settle in.

And then I think about the only reason any of this truly matters, which is how it affects my kids. They love it here in Athens, and there will considerable pressure on them to go to college here: Georgia is a terrific school, it’ll be financially convenient for them to go here, they’ll have lots of opportunities in a place they already know well. I will support whatever decision they make—a decision that is closer than they or I want to admit—but I do find myself wanting them to branch out and see more of this planet, to challenge themselves, to meet people different than the ones they already know. To do, essentially, what I did.

But I don’t know if I’m right, or at least if I’m right when it comes to what they will want. That is the trade off, among the many they will be making in the years to come, as we all must: Of all the things they have, what do they want to hang on to, and what are they willing to let go? Do they want to belong? Do they want to explore? Do they want to figure out a way to have both? Can they? I’m in my third place that I’ve lived in more than a decade, and I feel both eternally connected and a little distant and removed from all three of them. I wonder if we all feel this way. I wonder if that’s just what all of this is.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. An Ode to Tom Thibodeau, New York. I really enjoyed writing this tribute to the coach with the perpetual mustard stain on his tie.

2. Your Five MLB Fascinations, MLB.com. This week: Jurickson Profar, Jo Adell, Randy Arozarena, Seth Lugo and the very annoying Jack Flaherty.

3. I Wrote About How We Talk About Mike Trout, After Yet Another Injury, MLB.com. What a bummer.

4. Best Sports Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with Challengers.

5. Your April Month in Review, MLB.com. We’re (slightly more than) one month through the season already.

6. This Week’s Power Rankings, MLB.com. Any piece where I get to mention Tommy Pham is a happy piece.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed the excellent “Challengers” and “The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed.” We’re going to be a day late with the show this week because we’re doing our annual in-person show in LA on Monday.

Seeing Red, Bernie and I are weirdly optimistic about the Cardinals.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“A racial slur and a Fort Myers High baseball team torn apart,” Howard Bryant, ESPN. It is very difficult to read this story and not feel deep sorrow and despair for what we are becoming.

Also, this Brian Klaas piece about a Japanese doomsday cult that may have set off a nuclear device in the ‘90s is riveting and scary and also entertaining in the way he consistently pulls off.

And I was moved and saddened, as the son of an Air Force man, by this Bulwark piece about the military’s recruitment woes and the overwhelming strain the last 20 years have placed on military families.

Finally, if you have one of those friends or family members who say “it’s not enough that he’s not Trump, I need a reason to vote for Biden,” this comprehensive but very readable and logical Noah Smith piece makes a pretty definitive case. If there’s anyone you know who will actually listen, you should send it to them.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Working on the Highway,” Bruce Springsteen. On May 28, my friend Steven Hyden’s fantastic book “There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A’ and the End of the Heartland” comes out. I love the book very much, and I was honored that Steve asked me to blurb it.

This isn’t the best song off “Born in the U.S.A.,” but it’s the one that I hear the most in my mind when I think of the album. Buy the book. Also, don’t forget the newsletter I wrote about attending a Springsteen concert with my parents last year, which was a pretty good one.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

We’re coming to the end of the Little League season. This guy is ready for the playoffs.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will