Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. — Robert Frost, “Death of the Hired Man”

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA WILL ALWAYS BE THAT PLACE FOR ME. I can leave it, but it always exerts an irresistible draw, like a mother calling her child home.

When I was a few months from being discharged from the Army, I seriously considered living in New Hampshire, drawn by my love of Robert Frost’s poetic imagery. It seemed like a place filled with folksy authenticity — men in hunting caps sipping hot cider around a wood stove in some general store, speaking in clipped sentences about the weather and rising sap in the sugar bush.

Having been to New England since, I can confirm that it does indeed have such scenes. I remember walking into a little general store in rural Vermont a few years back and there it was — taciturn men in hunting caps, cider, the whole bit.

But New England was too settled, too static, to keep me. It strikes me as a place where your family’s reputation follows you through life, and someone from a “bad” family always lives under the shadow of suspicion, no matter what he or she has done as an adult. There are people there who are described as the “new family in town” who have lived in the same house for 40 or 50 years.

As a younger man I toyed with the idea of living in New York City. It is a place that almost throbs with energy. Manhattan is filled with buildings that are tall to the point of absurdity, the streets are filled at every hour with people from every corner of the world, and there is a very vivid sense that you are in the Capital of the World. It feels like the 21st-century equivalent of Rome in the year 130 or so. There is wealth beyond the fondest wish of avarice, poverty that is both shocking and heartbreaking, moviemakers, musicians, artists and poets. It is a place where anyone who is anyone has done something important or groundbreaking. It is where jazz completed the transition from a rural to an urban art form, and again from being mostly dance music to something far more sophisticated and cerebral.

Kurt Vonnegut supposedly once advised someone to “Live in New York once, but leave before you get too hard.” I understand what he was getting at. There is a sort of naked, unadorned ruthlessness in New York that I find disturbing. It seems like the kind of place that casts out anything short of excellence. It is a city that needs more mercy in its soul, and I was afraid of what living there might do to me.

I have been charmed by the South when I’ve visited. The people there drive slowly, talk slowly, and in general take their time with things.

Coming from the hectic Bay Area rat race, that can take a little getting used to. I remember the first time I stood third or fourth in line at a supermarket in a small southern town, I wondered impatiently why the lady at the register was taking an extra five minutes with a customer, asking after her family and how her garden was coming along. The clerk did the same with the next lady and the next — and by the time it was my turn at the register I sort of hoped she would chat me up, too. It struck me as a deeply humane way to live. There is more to life than packing in as much into each hour as possible.

But there is a long and sad history still present in the South. I’ve been to the Civil Rights Museum on Montgomery, Alabama, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church in Atlanta, so I’ve seen that there has been much progress in the last few decades. But I’ve also walked the humid, leafy squares in Savannah, Georgia, and when I did it struck me that I was walking pathways that had seen slaves come and go from the markets where they were sold; I saw auction blocks where husbands saw their wives for the last time, sold to some other plantation owner many miles away. I saw these things and suddenly understood why Faulkner’s stories seemed so often filled with melancholy and spiritual ruin.

California is where the settlers finally ran out of continent, and in its culture that pioneering spirit and pluck has survived — in the technological inventiveness that is the envy of the world, in our world-leading film industry, our constantly groundbreaking aviation pioneers, and much else. It functions as the place where America tests ideas — pollution control on cars, to name just one, and many and various social reform movements have started here and spread to the rest of the country.

Vonnegut also supposedly said, “Live at least once in Northern California, but leave before you get too soft.”

I think he was full of beans: I can never leave this place behind. It is home.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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