Uniquity II

Nobody asked but…

I’m not bragging here, just trying to make a point. I call the collection of all the places I have ever lived the Ring of Forelle. I was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. How about you? Already all the people born in the rest of the world are different from all the people born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. While I lived in the neighborhood of Chattanooga, I also lived in the towns of Redbank and Signal Mountain. Then I moved to Liberty, Kentucky at the age of 4 years old, and I lived there for about 6 months, and then on to Lexington Kentucky, and so forth, and so on. I have lived in many places. I’ve lived in Manhattan, New York City, New York, Boston, Massachusetts, Chicago, Illinois, Denver, Colorado, Littleton, Colorado, Springfield, Illinois — in two different places (in the first place I lived in a boarding house right downtown apart from my wife and family who were still in Cincinnati, Ohio, when they came to Springfield to join me, we bought a little house in the suburbs).  What is the significance of this? If you can name me two towns that are exactly alike at all points in time then I will tell you it makes no difference. I have lived in at least 24 separate places at different times. You and I could play a little game where we discovered the place where we are first different. We could name places where we have lived and as soon as one person has named a place that the other person has never lived, we are different people.  Through such a process, you, I, and everyone else are unique, even if two of us started from a genetic dead heat.

— Kilgore Forelle