Genesis, or Nature vs. Nurture

By closest estimation, I have lived at least forty-two places throughout the course of my life thus far.  Three of those can be disqualified because they're places I lived before I graduated from high school:  my parents were calling the shots.  

The other thirty-nine moves are all mine by choice, by chance, by circumstance, or by some combination thereof.  So it's safe to say that in my adult life I've moved, on average, once every seven months.  This does not take into account all the other traveling I've done.  Add it up and all this movement might start to look like an illness - if I didn't enjoy doing it so much.

In the past several years my restlessness has only increased.  I've taken to pondering, at idle times, what it is within me that has caused this wayward behavior.  The genesis, you might say.  The origin.  Those little twigs of disquietude lying deep within me that I've touched with the flame of curiosity and turned into a roaring fire.

Here are a few things that have occurred to me:

- The hospital where I was born is about thirty miles from the town my parents lived in at the time.  That means that I took my first road trip when I was a mere few days old.  Thirty miles is a long way when you're an infant.

- Before I turned a year old, my dad took a new job in a town ten miles away.  We moved.  I can imagine myself as a toddler, playing among the boxes while my mom and dad packed, the smell of cardboard permeating my young brain.

- My grandpa on my mom's side of the family owned an Allis Chalmers dealership when I was small.  He sold farm implements and tractors to farmers all over the county.  Much to my grandma's consternation (and, undoubtedly, to provide my mom with a little relief), he would often bundle me up and take me with him when he had to go to St. Louis to pick up parts.  The car trip was two hours one way.

- On my dad's side, my grandpa owned a business delivering gasoline in a tanker truck to the farms surrounding the town where he and my grandma lived.  He got a kick out of taking my brother and me with him on his rounds.  From the time we were very little, he would let us climb the ladder and get on top of the truck to 'help' him when he refilled from the main storage tank.  I probably breathed more gasoline fumes than were healthy for me at that age, but it was a smell I associated with Grandpa so to me it was good.

- When I was four, my parents loaded me and my brother Rob, who was five, into our big old Buick for one of the longest and most ambitious road trips our family ever embarked upon.  My first real memories are from things we saw and did while on this trip.  Over the course of a couple months, we drove from Illinois to Texas, traveled on to Southern California, and came back through Las Vegas, Arizona and Colorado.  It was the summer of 1971 and car seats for children were unheard of.  Rob and I were small enough to lay in the back floorboards of the car with our heads on the 'hump' in the center.  The warmth, the motion of the car, and the sound of the tires on the pavement below were as soothing as any lullaby.

There are plenty of other instances I could give, but the ones I've listed here are a few of the earliest.  So:  Is my case an argument for nature, or for nurture, as Charles Darwin would put it?  Was I born with this love of - and need for - travel and continual motion?  Did the circumstances of my most formative years cause me to become the way I am today, or did they merely bring out what was already embedded deep within my genetic structure?  I like to think it was a lot of both.