My birth year is within two years of the most earnest love letter to this area, written by local native Jonathan Richman when he was in his early twenties. "Roadrunner" was a simple late-night tour of Route 128, the ring road around Boston. Over two chords, he sang-spoke about the magic of supermarkets and power lines, and did a better job of conveying the feeling of actually living here than the cartoon advertisements that local pop anthems usually are. "Roadrunner" is mysterious and compelling enough that three decades after first publication, English journalist Laura Barton came over and retraced the song's route. Her account ended up as so much unfulfilled tourism, a list of disconnected suburban vignettes. Perhaps she made the mistake of getting out of the car, turning the radio off, and actually talking to people.

I've driven on 128 countless times, with and without specific purpose, with the radio either on or off -- as recently as last night. But the route can't inspire curiosity, or wonder, or AM power, or magic, or love for the modern world anymore. Back in the 1980's, this was the road my father would drive my sister and I along, back and forth four times on alternating weekends, after my parents' divorce. Much later, a company behind one exit hired my own former spouse, which was the reason I moved back at all. Behind other exits, traffic jams, four decades' worth of classmates and friends I don't know anymore, bad memories, stuff I'd appreciate forgetting.

Is this what we do? Use places up, fill them with so many mistakes, messes, setbacks and burnt bridges that we can't stand to be there anymore? Perhaps the best-case scenario is that we stay in one place so long that we pretend we have some kind of ownership of it, better to make the lives of recent arrivals miserable with politics. For many people I know, the search for a place to belong is complicated and full of regret; there's always somewhere else.

I guess Jonathan Richman ended up leaving Boston, for whatever reason, and he moved out to California. But before he did, there were at least ten distinctly different "Roadrunners," assisted by whatever group of musicians he called the Modern Lovers at any given time. "Over the course of the various recordings," Barton wrote, "He refers to the Turnpike, the Industrial Park, the Howard Johnson, the North Shore, the South Shore, the Mass Pike, Interstate 90, Route 3, the Prudential Tower, Quincy, Deer Island, Boston harbour, Amherst, South Greenfield, the 'college out there that rises up outta nuthin,' Needham, Ashland, Palmerston, Lake Champlain, Route 495, the Sheraton Tower, Route 9, and the Stop & Shop."

Well into the 1990's, he kept performing and recording versions of the song, including an eight-minute epic from 1977 in which he veered off 128 and visited snowy towns in western Massachusetts. Even when he was as old as I am now, he still saw "America's Technology Highway" as more than the punchline that title is. Driving at an unspecified illegal speed, it was new each time, with discoveries behind every exit and interesting people he hadn't met yet. Plus, there was always something good at the Stop & Shop.

"Roadrunner" is a reminder that Boston and New England didn't fail me; instead, I gave up on the area and stopped thinking positive about it. I'm still young enough (I think) to start over in a new place, and I'm moving to a city that's strange and wonderful and mysterious, where creativity flows freely, where people are generally kind because there's plenty of room for everyone. My reasons for moving there aren't what they once were, but it's a place that's big enough to put any disappointment in proper perpective. It's a city I love, and I'll try to write as many love letters as I can to it -- even if they're as simple as capturing the possibility and excitement inherent in walking to the Jewel Osco with headphones on, late at night, while it's cold outside.