One thing that has always fascinated me is how our lives can be changed by things completely beyond our control.

In the early '60s, I was in junior high school looking forward to high school -- in Ohio. Ohio was pretty much all I knew I had lived there since I was 3, and we had lived in a suburb north of Dayton since I was 7 and in second grade.

When we moved into Huber Heights in 1957, it was brand new, the second step of evolution in the postwar Levittown-type community development. Charles Huber's housing project was billed as the largest community of all-brick homes in the world. I think by the time it was finished in the early '60s, there were something like 9,000 homes. We lived in a starter home at first, and when our family grew, we moved into a large home in the newest part of the community in 1961.

It's funny, especially when you look at what has happened to home prices in a lot of places, but Huber Heights hasn't appreciated all that much. I checked Zillow.com, the real estate site, and saw that the 2,000 square foot home -- four bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths -- that my parents bought in 1961 for a little more than $18,000 is now valued at only $118,000. That's not all that high for a nice suburb.

[caption id="attachment_802" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Wayne H.S."]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/wayne-hs.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-802" title="wayne-hs" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/wayne-hs-300x92.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="92" /></a>[/caption]

By the end of seventh grade, I was starting to look forward to ninth grade at Wayne High School. It was a nice new school building, but one of the only things I remember about it now is that we had the worst basketball team in the state of Ohio. I think we were 0-19 my seventh-grade year.

Why am I thinking about this? Maybe because we wonder a lot about the roads not taken, especially when it wasn't our choice to take them or not. Three years ago, at my dad's funeral, I was talking to my cousin Marti, who is nine months younger than I am and grew up outside Columbus.

I asked her a weird question, but it was one of those questions that always has fascinated me. I asked her if her life had turned out differently than she had thought it would when she was growing up. Her response really touched me.

<em>"Well, I never thought when I was growing up that I would ever leave Ohio."</em>

I suppose my life would have been very different if we had stayed in Ohio rather than moving to Virginia, but I can't really say in what way. I certainly would have had different friends, and since I can't imagine better friends than I have had, I probably would have been worse off there. I would never have met my first wife, which would have saved me that agony.

It's really not worth analyzing, because there's no way of knowing where I would have gone to school ... or college ... or where I would have entered the work world.

I guess the thing that makes me wonder is just that I didn't have anything to say about it.