“TRAVEL IS FATAL to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

–Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

As I sit and watch the closing minutes of the Syracuse Orange’s soon-to-be win over my gritty hometown St. Bonaventure Bonnies, I find it to be an apt metaphor for the difference between my life as a Bona graduate student and a teacher back in the small school district in which I grew up, and my life here as a husband and a teacher in another small district near Syracuse, in what seems both literally and figuratively a much bigger place.

I’m drinking soy egg nog. I ate couscous for dinner. Last night, I drank my share of Blue Moon, the best citrus-tinged wheat beer this side of anywhere. In the past 8 months alone, I have visited the heart of New York City, the seen the most beautiful vistas in Maine, and spent a long weekend in the Adirondacks.

None of which I would likely have done anytime soon had I stayed where I was, in my little safe, successful, yet sheltered, “corner of the earth.” As a severe creature of habit and a bachelor, it would have remained standard water and juice and regular pasta. Standard Labatt Blue. Trips to town and back. Standard.

Not to mention the fact that I am a married man getting ready to put my name on my first mortgage after being a renter for going on six years, though it feels like forever.

This is not to say that I no longer value meat and potatoes. Oh, I do. This is not to say that I don’t value my roots; I do, immeasurably. I could not be who I am without my family, along with the teachers, coaches, and eventual colleagues I had the honor to learn under and work with who dedicated their lives to helping make people like me successful. Fate and necessity caused a need to leave, and with both intertwined, I did.

In the summer of 2008, after six years of teaching and coaching in the same classrooms and on the same fields which reared me, I watched the first class I ever taught as seventh graders in 2002 graduate; then I left behind tenure and security to move four hours north with my then-girlfriend and start anew. That class contained my little brother, and it was surreal to see them ready to enter the world. I was about to practice what I preached to them when they were my students– make an impact, don’t be afraid to be your own person, and most importantly– try.