(Adopted)Home Again
There’s no place like it!
I am a native of Long Island, NY. This means, among other things, that every place I travel or live that is NOT Long Island is exotic, foreign, and mysterious. And yet, I haven’t lived on my home island since I left for college in East Lansing, Michigan in 1969. East Lansing might seem humdrum to the sophisticated bon vivants of the world. But to the 18-year-old Pamela Bongiorno, the plane I took to get there was a magic carpet delivering me to land where a beach was a field where you could suntan without being in 100 miles of actual water, and Greeks were people who belonged to fraternities and sororities. Since then I have spent serious time in Chicago, Dijon, France, Ithaca (NY, that is) as well as Jersey City, State College PA, and Medellin, Colombia. I have spent hot minutes in places all over the world, including Taipei, Istanbul, and Singapore, among others. These days home base is Pittsburgh, PA.
It’s not something I could have predicted, that’s for sure. I had a vague notion of Pittsburgh as a former steel town and current sports-crazy city. And maybe there were rivers?? But our move came about because my daughter highly recommended we retire here. She and her family ended up in the Iron City via a Peace Corps stint in Romania. Her husband took a Peace Corps-related assistantship at Duquesne University when he did his master’s…
