Inside the Perimeter

I moved to Atlanta in 1984. I dug my mom's old Austin Marina out of a snowbank in Columbus, Ohio on March 3rd, and headed down the road towards my destiny in the south.

The reasons why I'm waxing nostalgic is many-fold. First of all, as I write this, I'm sitting in Manuel's Tavern with my second beer in front of me, and one of the city's best burgers working it's way through my digestive system. I am at peace with the world, in my "happy place," and feeling swell. The other reason is because I'm in the middle of another transition in my life. We just got an offer on our house in Avondale Estates, and we're seriously looking for a new place to move to.

This isn't the first time we've gone through this dance, my wife and I... We've been married for nearly 22 years, and in that time we've owned six houses. We've been at this last one for 9 years, which I believe is a record. It's a swell house, but with our daughter in college, we find it's more house than we need, and so we begin the search anew.

So the question looms; where are we going to live? Well, in all these years there has only been one answer for us - inside the perimeter. What can I say? We're intown people.

Our first house was on Hale Street in Inman Park. This was back in '92, when the neighborhood was described as being "transitional," which meant that we could count on having our car, and even our house broken into. It was all part of the deal.

That first place itself was "transitional." We even had to install a furnace before we moved in, and then spent long weekends demolishing walls, putting up drywall, and painting. We were naive idiots, but we were young and full of enthusiasm, and we got through it.

After the birth of our daughter we installed air conditioning, having put up with the heat before that through a combination of floor fans, squirt bottles, and as little clothing as we could manage. We also used our front screened-in porch as an extra living room.

Eventually we decided that we didn't want to raise our daughter in a place where bums regularly went through our trash, and so we moved to Decatur. But that's another story.

The reason I bring all this up is because no matter where we moved, whether it was to a 1900's bungalow, or to in-fill housing in Decatur or even to our loft on DeKalb Avenue (back when our friends would ask us: "A loft? You mean like a hayloft?"), we chose to live intown, in the heart of Metro Atlanta, where there are sidewalks and neighborhoods and parks and an ineffable lifestyle that has appealed to us since that very first place. I know no matter where we end up, that's where we'll be.

Or it could just be the beer talking.