Wondering How I Would Have Been Different If ...

When I was young, I lived in a small town in Louisiana called Vidalia. It's on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River directly across from Natchez, Mississippi. I went to school from first through seventh grades there between fall of 1968 and spring of 1975.

Then one day my Dad came to me and asked me how I would like it if we moved to Monroe, Louisiana. Now you gotta understand, at age 11, and living in a town of about 4,000 souls, the prospect of moving to a city of 50,000 people was an awesome thing to contemplate. Heck, when we used to travel to visit my paternal grandparents in Bastrop, LA, we would BEG our parents to drive through Monroe so's us country mice could see the big city. People even had two story homes in Monroe! And there were many multi-story buildings too! Wow!

It was like asking me if I wanted to go visit Santa's workshop, so my answer was a big ol' YEAH!

So, after the school year ended in May 1975 (and my sister graduated from HS), we moved to Monroe. And I went from 8th grade through high school there and my first time in college. I consider Monroe to be my home town. This move changed my life so drastically.

And I wonder, what would my life have been like had I grown up in the small town of Vidalia? Not necessarily better or less so, but certainly different.


I think about this because we moved to Palm Bay, Florida when my daughters were in 2nd and 6th grades. How different would their lives be if we would have had an opportunity to stay in Monroe. They started school in Monroe because we had moved back to Louisiana from Georgia for me to attend Louisiana Tech, to finish the electrical engineering degree I'd started at Southern Tech in Marietta, Ga.

It's just strange to think about how different our lives would have been had we gone down different paths than we have. For example, my time in the Atlanta area was the genesis of me starting back to college in the first place. And what a difference my engineering degree has made.

Of the two moves I've talked about here, I would change neither.

Have there been moves or changes in your life you wish you could take back or do you ever wonder how things would have been different?

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Terry Bradshaw

Since I talked about having gone to Louisiana Tech, I have to mention this about Terry Bradshaw, a fellow graduate of LA Tech. He just donated a bunch of his football stuff, including super bowl rings and whatnot to the school.

Very, very cool.