I Was Thinking... How Did I Get Here?

Last week I wrote about the graduating seniors and speculated about where their lives would lead them. It got me to thinking about how I ended up in Kasson. For most of us, home is where we grew up.

Even though I’ve lived most of my life in Kasson, my hometown is a small town in NE Wisconsin. That is where I’m from even though this is where I live. When you grow up, you seldom contemplate where you will live someday. You might fantasize about moving to someplace exotic like Paris, NYC, or Hawaii but for the most part many of us end up in places we never expected.

Every week I meet with eight other retired teachers from Byron at Otto’s Bakery. We all spent 30 plus years teaching there. Yet none of us are from there and five of the nine had never even heard of Byron when they were growing up. A teaching job brought us from White Bear Lake, Northeast Minneapolis, Mound, Iowa and Wisconsin.

Of my three closest friends from high school, only one is still where they grew up.

I’m in Minnesota, another friend is in Milwaukee, and the third is in Texas.

My wife grew up in Litchfield, MN and I in Peshtigo, Wisc., yet we have had cousins that have lived in Texas, Arizona, California, Washington, Montana, Illinois, Kentucky, Hawaii, and Alaska.

It is amazing how these people that grew up in small towns end up in faraway places.

With easy access to transportation and communication today, where you grew up seldom is a barrier to where you may end up. When doing research on my family history, I found that my grandparents’ generation generally stayed close to home. One or two may venture some distance away, but most were within visiting distance.

My parent’s generation spread out a little further but usually were within a day’s drive and were in the same state or a neighboring one. But my generation spread out even further.

Most of the people I know in Kasson or Mantorville weren’t from here originally. Some may have grown up in the general area, but many others didn’t. It isn’t unusual to have somebody from Byron, Dodge Center, or Stewartville to end up living here but what if you grew up in India, Romania, Sudan or Tanzania. Would they ever in their wildest imaginations guess they would be in Kasson, Minnesota.

A former pastor at St. John’s Lutheran was Nirmala Reinschmidt from India. The current pastor of the First Baptist Church in Kasson is Pastor John Todor from Romania. Father John Lasuba of the Holy Family Catholic Church in Kasson is from Sudan and Pastor Deborah Lyanga at St. John’s grew up in Tanzania. But it isn’t a one-way street either.

Just because you grew up in the Kasson-Mantorville area doesn’t mean you will stay here either. One of our daughters lives in Bemidji. A local family is getting ready for a long trip to visit their daughter. They will be flying to China. A neighbor of mine has a son who has hopped all over the globe. He and his family have lived in China, in Singapore and Qatar. I’m sure there are many other families that have children that also have moved well beyond the circulation of the DCI.

So, I guess Dr. Seuss was right, “Oh the Places You’ll Go.” When we are growing up we shouldn’t be afraid to dream big, because we may never know where we will end up. But no matter where we end up, something deep inside us will always remember where we grew up.

Did You Ever Wonder? — How far west do you have to go before you get to the Far East?