Well, the day's finally here - it's time to say goodbye to White Plains, at least for the time being. I'll be coming back every now and then, and maybe, way down the line, I might end up living here again.
To be honest, for a good deal of my life, I never really felt that White Plains was 'home'. Having moved from Japan to California and finally back here, I always felt as though I were an outsider - a mere visitor who was passing by on my way to other things in the future. It probably affected the way I behaved when I was younger as well...looking back, I can say with fair certainty that I wouldn't have gotten along well with past versions of myself. I wasn't that friendly, and my greatest flaw - perhaps something that still exists, but on a much less personal level and more on bigger issues (e.g. politics) - is that I was far too judgmental. Most of it was without basis or reason, and it's a shame that it colored the way I viewed the people and the environment around me here in Westchester County.
But in the end, I suppose I've mellowed with age. I still think that the area's still too populated with overpriced shopping centers, but it's been a long time since I felt active antipathy towards what I felt was a privileged group of peers who didn't work as hard as I did in school. Who am I to judge others if I don't know them that well? My pastime as a 'dispassionate observer' of what happened around me was really more that of an uninformed person who merely viewed White Plains as a foreign place that was hard to associate with. With age, I've come to realize that the town, more so than either Japan or the deserts of southern California, is what will prominently be home in my mind...no matter where I end up down the road...and that it wasn't half as bad as my half-empty view of everything back then made it seem.
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