The article ran in the Tallahassee Democrat on November 5, 1995. It was also carried in Connecticut and elsewhere.

For centuries Americans have changed addresses frequently, almost like an annual ceremony. When the young Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he noted that people here moved restlessly, impatiently. "An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on," he remarked in amazement; "he will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bearing... he will take up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere with his changing desires."

Technology is now making it even easier to imagine breaking roots with home, since one can drop in Mom's backdoor at will, through the Internet or the mobile phone. But is virtual home sufficient?

It's true that last month the U.S. Census Bureau reported that Americans are less mobile now than at any time since 1950. In the 1950s and 1960s about 20 percent of the population changed addresses annually. The most recent figures show this rate has fallen slightly to 16.7 percent. Why the change? The U.S. population is getting older, with the baby boom just hitting fifty, and older people move less frequently. Further, middle-aged Americans increasingly live in less mobile two-income families, where wanderlust is curbed by the difficulty of finding new employment for two.

But U-Haul hardly needs to worry. People still want to move. Relocation among single people actually has risen slightly, the census study found. And let me add some anecdotal evidence. For the past several years, in my Florida State University history course on the United States Since 1945, I've asked students how many believe they will live as an adult in the same town in which they were raised. The response this semester was typical. Not a single student raised his or her hand. How many expected to live in the same state? About ten percent of the hands were raised, tentatively and ambivalently.

Of course these classroom results might be expected. College students, most of whom have gone away to school, have already made the first step toward a life of chasing their ambitions. A poll of working-class adolescents might produce a more rooted result. But it's clear that, as in the past, the nation in the future will find itself with a large number of adults who are trying to make a life in an area in which they weren't raised.

Like it or not, the residents of Tallahassee are affected by American rootlessness. As a university town and state capital, Tallahassee plays host to a relocated, transient population. In that respect, we are a miniature Manhattan. So, more than in many other towns the size of Tallahassee, it's important for us to ask how Americans can define the concept of home in this mobile society. How can we recreate its benefits when we're perpetually somewhere new? And what are the repercussions of not establishing it?

I'm sympathetic to what Americans face. In the past 22 years I've lived in five different towns, four different states, and 21 different residences. Now in my third corner of the country I'm getting used to redefining home.

Ironically, I was raised with an wickedly strong sense of place, and never thought I'd leave Oregon. Yet now, when the holidays show up, I have no idea where home is--whether Santa wears a snowsuit or shorts, whether we eat turkey around a fireplace or grill the bird on the hibachi during the backyard badminton festival.

Home once meant for me the physical and cultural landscape of Portland where my grandparents had settled, where my mother was raised, where I beheld the same streets and hills I had seen in weathered photos from the box in the closet, where I walked the neighborhoods and wooded canyons that had been the setting of old family stories: marriages, divorces, houses bought and sold, loves found and lost. As a university professor, like others in various professions these days, I have gone where the job is. A feeble but familiar excuse.

So what does the concept of home mean for me now? Partly it still means Oregon, where my parents and many siblings still live. Yet at that distance it serves more as a comforting memory than an active refuge. So to convince myself that I still have a home I announce my roots to the world more loudly than I need to. I have Oregon on my car, my coffee mugs, my shirts and hats. Nor am I alone. I am surrounded by a mobile culture in which other transplants wear declarations of their geographic heritage, in order to shield themselves from their own doubt about having abandoned that foundation.

Home has also been reduced to familiarity. I know I'm home when I know what lies around a corner before I get there. Now I feel at home when I've established a routine. When my running route becomes habit and I don't have to think about it. When I know the weather patterns and what to expect. When I wake up in the middle of the night and know where I am.

In conversations with students and colleagues, I've found that some people keep a sense of home by always orienting themselves toward the place in which they were raised. Others consider home to be where their parents are, no matter how often their parents continue to move. Some people, free from a preoccupation with home, replace it with other forms of reassurance.

Many of these restless citizens have occupational roots instead of familial or geographical roots. They identify with those in their occupation, so that lawyers or journalists or university professors feel at home with their colleagues, offices, and institutions wherever they go.

The same advances in technology that have prompted people to join a national job pool and to relocate frequently, have also softened the impact of those moves. Sadly, local and regional cultures have now given way to a nationalized mass society and culture. Consequently, look-alike suburbs, fast-food chains, and television shows provide reassurance and familiarity no matter where we move. We can now eat a Whopper Junior or watch the MacNeil-Lehrer Hour as easily in Wewahitchka as Washington.

As Tocqueville and others remind us, our tireless mobility is not a creation of our generation. But the national (not to mention international) reach of our corporations and institutions means that workers of a particular level are often shuffled from one page of the Rand McNally to another. And if my students and colleagues are any indication, we live in a society in which the prospect of living away from one's roots is expected but can be unsettling.

When my grandparents moved from Ontario to Oregon it meant that they fell out of touch with their families. With phones, e-mail, faxes, and airplanes, that is less so for today's transients. But we shouldn't underestimate the problems a lack of home creates in our society.

When you have a sense of home, a sense of continuity and investment in an area, you feel a stake in the health of the community and help maintain and protect it. Conversely, when you don't know if you'll live longer than a few years in a community, what's your incentive? You view the town like you drive a rental car: no need to change the oil or worry about the doors getting banged in the Pizza Hut parking lot. Similarly, I've never yet planted a tree while I've been renting a house, but I have while owning. Home is having the incentive to invest in a community, not only financially but imaginatively.

What's true of us is true of our children. Think about it. This anonymous, mobile society may be part of the cause of gang activity, crime, and vandalism. Loneliness and depression in teenagers and adults has an obvious connection to the lack of continuity in people's cultural surroundings. Anonymity and mobility can bring great freedom, exhilaration, and opportunity. But without a corresponding sense of place, without the geographic and cultural assurances of home, the tradeoff might not be worth it.

In my experience, technology hasn't been able to transport the feeling of home to me sufficiently through the phone lines, the Internet, or nationalized mass culture. Virtual home just doesn't cut it.