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| Photo by Rattlhed |
I Moved to Seattle 20 Years Ago
In case you missed it, Seattle won Super Bowl XLVIII yesterday. Also, here in New Jersey it is snowing. Again.
Those two things got me thinking about 1994. 1994 was a big year for me as I moved out to Seattle with CoolMom so that we could attend graduate school at the University of Washington (UW, pronounced "U-Dub"). It was also the worst, most snow-filled winter I can remember.
The early part of the year saw snowstorm after snowstorm, the last one dropping 2.8" of snow on the area on March 18th. 53.2" of snow fell that year, making 1994 the snowiest year in over 30 years. CoolMom and I were living in Hoboken; and, for the first three months of the year, parked cars were just icy lumps on either side of the street. I guess those people didn't need to drive as much as they thought they did.
We'd both applied to Ph.D. programs in economics. Determined to stay together and not do the long-distance thing, we ended up at UW because that was where we both got accepted and received funding. We could have stayed in New York, which would have meant a big tuition bill for one or both of us; but the idea of moving out to Seattle appealed to both of us for reasons beyond the financial or the relative strengths of the various economics programs. And I was ready to get out of the area after the horror of that winter.
So, in around August I guess, we moved west. We rented an apartment that was bigger and about 1/3 the price of anything we could have gotten in New York (Turns out we were paying more than almost all of our classmates). We had a car in CoolMom's red Tercel hatchback ("The Pod") that we could actually use to cart groceries back from the supermarket, and we started our program at the U.
We spent five years in Seattle and fell in love with the place. We fell in love with the scenery, the coffee, the wine, the beer, the food, the people. I never fell in love with the sports teams. More on that in a minute.
That first year was not easy, though. None of it. It was my first significant amount of time away from the East Coast. We were back in school after a few years and navigating a still young relationship. People often expressed disbelief that we'd turned down other programs to go to UW, but we wanted to be together. Also, if I'd had to do it on my own, I have no doubt that I would have flunked out quickly. As it is, I never got past a Masters and what they call ABD (All But Dissertation), which isn't a real thing; while CoolMom buckled down and became Dr. CoolMom.
My relationship with Seattle sports teams was a complicated one when we lived there. Actually, no. It was quite simple. I hated them.
During the mid-90s, when MLB still used the balanced schedule (AL teams played each other somewhere around 12 times per year, I think), there was a pretty significant rivalry between the Yankees and Mariners. I went to lots of M's / Yankees games at the dreary Kingdome; and many of them were good, old American League marathons. I even saw Ken Griffey, Jr.'s first-ever walk-off home run, hit against Yankee closer John Wetteland; and, of course, there were the playoffs in 1995. The M's had grown to be a thorn in the side of the Yankees; so, by the transitive property of sports hatred, I hated all Seattle teams. CoolMom never got it.
I did love our time in Seattle, though. It remains one of my two favorite cities in America, and it's where CoolMom and I officially decided we'd make this a forever thing between her and me. But grad school ended, and it was kind of a foregone conclusion that we'd come back to the New York Metro area. We've been back to Seattle maybe twice since 1999.
I actively rooted for the Seahawks yesterday. I guess the return by MLB to the unbalanced schedule combined with 15 years of being among, mostly, like-minded fans has softened my position on Seattle's teams. More than that, though, whenever I think about our time in that city -- particularly our decision in 1994, after that horrible winter, to take the leap and move out there -- I'm grateful. CoolMom and I are together, twenty years later, partly because of what we shared and worked through in Seattle.
CoolMom loves the place. I've never seen her root as hard for a non-Olympic sporting event as she did yesterday. She often talks about bringing the cooldaughters out there for a trip, showing them where Mom and Dad lived before they came along. Sometimes we talk about what it would be like to live there again, but we've got way too many attachments here now to consider really leaving.
They almost never get snow like this, though.
Built To Spill aren't from Seattle. They're from Boise, but this is from one of my favorite albums of 1994.
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