The audiobook version of Observations at the Speed of Life has officially been published and will be available at Audible, Amazon, and iTunes this week.

There have been several Weblogs about our time living in Memphis, but none about the change in lifestyle we made. I'm not referring to the slightly slower pace of the south compared to the breakneck world of Los Angeles or Boston.

Rather, I'm referring to the 'living in one place for a while' pace, which we had not experienced in our first dozen years of marriage. As an individual in the restaurant business, I more or less went where needed and my wife graciously partnered with me every step of the way.

But when we arrived in Memphis, our mindset was different, and it made a difference. We were 'professional relocators' and we used what we learned and what we missed and what we wanted to do and established a lifestyle that made a great environment to live and grow as a family.

Early in my career in the restaurant industry, my wife Betty and I moved several times. As newlyweds, we started in Leominster, Massachusetts and moved twice within that town during our four years there. 

We moved in with Betty’s parents for some months in Lunenburg after our car accident, since I needed a lot of attention. We moved to Wellesley for a summer when I was transferred to Boston and then moved downtown next to Boston Common for a year or so before we moved to Dorchester’s Savin Hill area.

After we'd been married for seven years, I took a job in Southern California, so we moved to the Channel Islands Marina part of Oxnard.

We were then transferred and moved to Fremont, California in the San Francisco Bay area. We moved again within Fremont before I was transferred back to LA, and we moved back to the Oxnard area, across the street from where we used to live, where our son was born. When I got a new job in Los Angeles, we moved to Marina del Rey near LA.  That’s twelve apartments in 11 years, for those of you keeping score at home.

From there we headed to Memphis, Tennessee, but we did so with a different perspective. 

For eleven years we hardly had a chance to get to know our neighbors, or even the neighborhood, so when we arrived in Memphis, we took a different approach. 

We decided to ‘immerse’ ourselves in the town and the culture. And of course, buying our first house had an impact on our stability. Memphis was a desirable place to live for several reasons, among them was the fact that there was no snow, except for one time, and the cost of living was a little bit less than LA or Boston if you know what I mean.

We decided to approach our lives there a little differently than we had done before. 

We wanted to get to know the town quickly. We decided to have one ‘big event’ every weekend. 

• It could be visiting a tourist attraction, for example, Elvis Presley’s Graceland.
• It could be an event of some kind, for example the Memphis in May International Barbecue Festival on the Mississippi River.
• It could be going to a community location, like the Memphis Zoo.

We were committed to doing something every week to get to know the town. 

We also subscribed to the daily Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper and quickly learned all those pat phrases that traffic reporters used that outsiders are clueless about. 

Phrases like the ‘Braintree Split’ and the ‘Leverett Connector’ in the Boston area, were replaced with ‘Crosstown’, ‘the Bridge’, and ‘Hack’s Cross’.

We were also determined to get to know our neighbors and the community. With a young son, there were plenty of opportunities for mothers to connect and pre-school friends were developed in our early years in the town.

Our house was on a small lake and if someone was walking a lap around the lake, they had to walk in front of our house, rather than behind, because there was no path behind.

Because of that, and because our son was learning to ride a tricycle and then a bicycle, we had a constant stream of neighbors walking by and a times stopping to chat. We actually hung out more in the driveway than on our deck overlooking the lake.

Eventually six families on our street got connected on a regular basis.  And the men occasionally got together for a beer. 

During one of those occasions, the six men started discussing coming up with a reason (excuse) for getting out of the house on a regular basis (and for three of us members, getting out of the after work childcare responsibilities).  

We lived on Pheasant Run Lane, so we started the “Pheasant Run Men’s Club”. We ‘met’ or scheduled a meeting monthly, and we got away to someone’s house or a local establishment to hang out. Usually, we watched a ballgame or just talked for a while and had a couple of beers.

Over time, we formalized things by having ‘theme’ nights. Two of them I remember.  

We were a diverse group: one of us was from California, another from St. Louis, Missouri, Buffalo, New York, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Collierville, Tennessee, and of course, Massachusetts. (Editor’s note: the prior sentence is the first time I’ve used eleven commas in a sentence). 

As a result, we created Local Beer Night and agreed that the following month everyone would bring a six-pack from their home area. Phil, the guy from California brought generic “Beer” which they have on the West Coast. I brought Narragansett (this was the days before Sam Adams).

And yes, Jim, the guy from St. Louis brought Budweiser and Rick, the guy from Buffalo brough Genesee. Not sure what beer Richard from Tennessee brought. Since there were six of us though, the six pack was perfect.

Another time we had ‘Sh*tty Beer Night’ and everyone brought a nasty beer to the meeting. I brought Narraganset again. Someone brought Guiness, and although I’m part Irish, I agreed with everyone else that it was terrible. 

We decided that the initiation ceremony for new members was to drink a warm Guiness in front of everyone.

We met monthly for several years and discussed business, sports, family, politics, and life. 

For a guy, a thousand miles from ‘home’ it was a welcome addition to my life and a return to that spirit of camaraderie that I had known to appreciate during my fraternity days.

We also developed a family event that was among the most memorable of our lives.

Our first year living on the lake, we went to bed at our regular time on the Fourth of July but couldn’t sleep because, unbeknownst to us, fireworks were being set off all around the lake. 

We went out on the deck and enjoyed the surprising show as people shot off real fireworks over the lake. We realized that Mississippi was only about a mile south of where we lived and guess what? The sale of fireworks was legal there. 

So, after that first Fourth of July, we planned for the next Fourth of July by getting fireworks across the state line.

And once the Pheasant Run Men’s Club was formed, every year several of us men’s club members headed over the line, sharing in the cost, and got hundreds of dollars of rockets and other explosives.  

We also built a small removable pier into the water behind our townhouse to stage the rockets and of course, we had a hose at the ready in case something went wrong.

(Which it never did). When it got dark we shot off our display over the lake, as did about twenty other groups. It was quite a sight.

But before it got dark Betty and I, mostly Betty, hosted a group dinner on the deck overlooking the lake, and called it “Lobster Mania”. 

Being from New England, we started the first Lobster Mania by teaching some neighbors how to eat a lobster and eventually it expanded to the "Official Pheasant Run Men’s Club July 4^th Lobster Mania" for our families and an occasional guest. 

And we did the whole shebang: bibs, claw crackers, placemats with instructions. It was my favorite holiday. Lots of friends, lots of lobster, lots of fireworks.

After ten years, we moved from Memphis and initiated some of the same concepts we had used to to become part of our new neighborhood in Ohio.

We continued occasional Lobster Mania dinners with neighbors but dropped the fireworks. We lived so close to Kings Island Amusement Park that we could watch their fireworks from our front yard, every night.  

But it was our backyard that was a magnet for friends and family with its sophisticated wiffle ball field that included lights, a removable Green Monster, a scoreboard and country music on a boombox. 

We continued to visit attractions, attend festivals, and go sightseeing.

When we moved back to Massachusetts after eleven years in Ohio, we dropped the Lobster Mania because most people here know how to eat lobster. The replacement? 

When summer arrives, my wife and son get lobster rolls almost every time we go out to eat. Some habits are not worth breaking. 

We lived away from ‘home’ for more than 25 years, and twenty plus of those years were in Memphis and Cincinnati. When we moved to Memphis, we lived in an apartment for a year before we bought our townhouse, and then we moved directly into our house in the Landen area of greater Cincinnati. (Some of you may have heard of the consulting firm Ambrose Landen, LLC?)

If you are still keeping score at home, that’s three moves, plus the move back to Massachusetts equals a total of fifteen different places we’ve lived. So, after twelve apartments in eleven years, we’ve lived in three homes and one apartment in forty years. A very different lifestyle.

Living in a great neighborhood is never an accident. A good formula is Desire + Connecting with Neighbors + Lobster or Wiffleball.