Going down to Charleston

Today I'm leaving for Charleston, SC to catch up with old friends, eat in some of the best restaurants in the country, and to soak up copious amounts of southern charm in the little colonial city by the sea.

I lived there from 1991-2000 -- nine years of incredible change in both my personal and professional life. I graduated from college, started a state-wide public radio show, penned numerous music / arts features for state newspapers, worked professionally in marketing for two performing arts organizations, travelled mostly by bicycle, and befriended some of the most unique, brilliant people I had ever met.

It was there I discovered a deep fascination with architecture (which isn't hard to do when it's piled up all around you), fell in love with graphic design, and toyed around with web design when it was first getting off the ground. It was also there I met my best friend, who a year later became my girlfriend, four years later my fiancée, and a year later my wife.

The foundation of nearly all my current interests -- both professional and personal -- are rooted in that city. I was lucky, for Charleston was (and still is) a tourist-driven town, with plenty of job opportunity for waiters, bartenders, and concierges. But if your aspirations leaned towards technology, Fortune 500 clientele, having enough income to purchase a house inside the city, and you weren't the descendent of a well-to-do family, Charleston could also be a stubborn, slow, impossible city to call home.

But Charleston was the perfect place to get your post-college feet wet, and to experience what living in crowded coastal town was all about. We used to joke that it was like New York on the beach, for like NY we had a rich community of artists, authors, musicians, and of course some of the shadiest people you'd ever hope not to meet, but everyone was crammed into four or five city blocks. It was a utopian, edge-of-America environment where you could easily get caught up in the local flow and ignore the rest of the world, as well as your own future.

So I left in 2000 and haven't returned since. Not out of spite, but because of time and not feeling a strong urgency to return. You can get pretty tired of a place after nine years, and lord knows when I drove away four years ago in that clunky, non-air conditioned U-Haul on a blazing hot July afternoon, I knew I wouldn't be back for a very long time. I had 'hit the ceiling' as they say, and all signs were pointing out of town.

Obviously I'm pretty excited, for today (and for the first time) I'll be in Charleston as a tourist, without a local address, to once again enjoy all it has to offer.