It's funny. I can't believe how old I felt when I was 38, but I was still so young.

I was 38 when I left Colorado, which was maybe the place I had enjoyed living the most up to that point in my life. I had been offered a job in Reno at a significant raise in pay, a job offer that came at an extremely difficult point in my life. For the first eight years of my journalism career, I had been working my way west with the goal of living in the San Francisco Bay Area. It seemed to important to me, even though part of it was because of a promise I had made to someone who wasn't even a part of my life anymore.

I was 38 and single -- actually divorced, but alone all the same. I had made significant progress in my career despite a late start, and I was highly regarded in Colorado journalism circles, both as a sportswriter and as a sports editor. But I wanted a family, and I was closing in on 40. I had nearly gotten married the year before to someone who mattered a lot to me, but it would have meant moving back to Virginia and that was something I really didn't feel like I could do.

Colorado was maybe my favorite place I ever had lived, but I don't think I had ever given serious consideration to staying there. It was always all about getting to California for me.

[caption id="attachment_776" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Memories of Colorado, No. 7"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/20110105_11.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-776" title="20110105_1" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/20110105_11-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>[/caption]

Other than maybe St. Louis and all the travel I got to do covering college basketball, I don't think I ever enjoyed being a sportswriter more than I did during those two years in Colorado. I'll never forget standing on the sidelines at Mile High Stadium in the final two minutes of a Broncos game, looking up at a stadium jammed with 76,000 screaming fans and watching John Elway work his two-minute-drill magic.

I never lived anyplace with a better climate. Hot and dry in the summer, and cool at night. Plenty of snow in the winter and pleasant springs and autumns.

But I wanted to live in California.

It's funny. I have compared my friend Mick to Jay Gatsby for years, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald's line that he had paid a very high price for living so long with the same dream. But Mick wasn't the only one who paid a price. He wasn't the only one who dreamed.

My friend who still lives in Colorado, who has lived there her entire life, told me once that she could never leave Colorado.

She didn't have to say why.

In the end, I certainly can't regret going to Los Angeles. It's where I met my wife Nicole and where I became a dad to two of the most wonderful children in the world, Pauline and Virgile. Life was good in California and I pray that retirement here in Georgia will be as good.

But what my friend didn't tell me was that when I left Colorado, I would miss it. I've never believed there is only one place I could be happy, except to say that happiness for me is wherever Nicole is. But it's funny. I don't think a week has gone by in the last 23 years that I haven't thought about my two years in Colorado, about how much I enjoyed it, about how beautiful the scenery is.

It was a special time, a special place.