I've been a homeowner since 1978, two different houses in the same small city. But before that, I moved all the time, from a college dorm, to a basement room, to boot camp barracks (two different ones as you progressed), to training school barracks, to a minesweeper on which I lived for about a year in transit off Vietnam, with stops in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Subic Bay P.I., Guam, Kwajalein, and Long Beach Ca. including for a time in the Todd Ship Yard, and on to Midway Island in the Mid-Pacific for 8 months, an old welfare hotel in downtown Milwaukee where I wintered over working at the Navy Recruiting Office, to a nice rented room in a home in Greensboro, N.C., for grad school on GI Bill, to a little motel-like unit off campus at NCSU working for the Veterans Administration. After that, things got better. I married my late wife, and started living like a middle-class person. Roughly nine different residences. Since I was kind of an independent, somewhat solitary kid, I'm not sure the mobility was such a good thing. It takes me a long time to befriend people, so there was a solitude that wasn't always beneficial. On the other hand, I got to know myself pretty well.
