Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore
It would be so fine to see your face at my door
++++++++++++++++++++ -– Carole King

In a moment of nostalgia, I look on Google Earth for the Continental Insurance data center in Neptune where I worked 35 years ago. The once starkly modern three-story building appears abandoned, its parking lots empty and overgrown. Trying to find a earlier view with any signs of life, I have to go back in the timeline more than twelve years.

I drive past the building to get a closer look, and arrive right after giant demolition machines have begun to chew away at it. Already one corner of the building has been torn away – the third-floor executive offices are gone, now just a ragged hole and a pile of concrete and bent steel. Gone too is my up-and-comer, double-size cubicle location in the corner of the floor below. I think of my lost friends and moving myself and my family around the country chasing the next, better job.

All lost in the moves, me, all, all lost in the moves.

Even moving to another town, let alone another state, we lose something. It’s too bad we can’t all stay and live and love where we were born and not have all this loss.