Only two of my major life decisions have an exact date of origin, meaning that I can pinpoint exactly when they were made.    One of these is the decision to not move back to my home town.

Since New Year’s Eve, I’ve had U2 on the brain.  (“A 1987 Bono for the New Year”).   I’ve pulled out all of the old albums, so it was only a matter of time before this nugget came my way.

There is a short list of music that I associate with the Fall of my Freshman year of college, for all the obvious and not-so-obvious reasons:  R.E.M., Guns n’ Roses, and U2, with a dash of The Doors on the side.  These were the albums playing in the dorm halls, fueling our parties, and bonding us with new friends.

U2’s Rattle and Hum was released that fall, and for many of us, it was cause for an expedition out of the dorms, to purchase it at Tower Records on the Ave  (on cassette tape, of course.  And by the way…..R.I.P. Tower Records).    The day it came out, you could walk down the hallways of McMahon Fifth South and hear it wafting from every other door.

Those first few months away from home, I didn’t have reason to venture much farther than the University District.   But my RA had an internship that gave her access to free passes to movie premieres.  When she scored enough tickets, we headed out of the U District for the night (one of these outings, of course, was to see the U2 movie “Rattle and Hum”).  The movies were held at theaters all over town, giving me a chance to see other parts of the city.

On the night when the Big Decision was made, whatever movie we were seeing was playing at Uptown Theatre on lower Queen Anne.  I had never been to Queen Anne, although I would later live there for four years.  We piled into a van, and I loved the feeling of not knowing where we were going, and not being in charge of getting us home.  I was along for the ride.

We traveled down I-5, towards the sparkling lights of downtown – very far from the wheatfields and desert vistas of my hometown.  I had never consciously thought of it, but maybe in the back of my head, I assumed that, after college, I would move back home.

But on this night, looking out that van window, I thought to myself:  This is my city now. 

In a strange way, the world just opened up.  I said to myself — I don’t have to move back there.  I could live here (or anywhere else), forever.   And in that moment, I knew that I would never again live in my hometown. 

I had fallen in love with a city.  The hook set even further with the onset of grunge music a few years later, when Seattle became the self-proclaimed music capital of the world (and maybe it was, for a while).  If there was a better place to be in college during those years, I don’t know where it was.    

I’ve now lived in Seattle longer than I lived in my hometown, a milestone that did not go unnoticed.  The University District haunts that I knew are mostly gone.   The entire city has cocktail lounges where once there were dive bars, and the grimiest of my old college bars, although still in business, now proclaims itself to be a “nightclub”.  I’ve watched the influx of California and East Coast transplants, with their incessant whining about the rain.    But I still don’t see myself living anywhere else.

And the other life decision with a precise point of origin?   I’m keeping that one to myself, but I will say that, in true Pacific Northwest fashion, it happened on a crystal clear September day, on a trail about halfway up the side of Mt. Rainier.