I have been thinking a lot about love lately.

Maybe it's because I'm rocketing toward another one of those birthdays with a zero at the end of it, or maybe it's because I am seeing an analyst for the third time in my life. But actually, I think it's just because I have reached a point in my life where I feel more love toward others and receive more love from others than ever before.

Mostly it's my lovely wife. A week from tomorrow, Nicole and I will celebrate the 17th anniversary of our marriage. We have been through a lot together, both good and bad, and we have raised two amazing children together. Both Pauline and Virgile are out of college, married and started in their careers, and we are blessed that both of them are close to us and to each other and that neither of them seems to be on track for writing a "Mommy/Daddy Dearest" memoir anytime soon.

We have a granddaughter, too. I'm sure every grandparent considers their descendants the most amazing, beautiful baby in the world, but I don't think many of them could hold a candle to little Madison Nicole Kastner. Her parents have done a wonderful job with her so far, and I couldn't be more proud of Pauline or Ryan. I'm looking forward to their second effort in a couple of years, just as I'm looking forward to Virgile and Sterling having their first child at some point in the future.

Early next summer, Pauline, Ryan and Maddie will head off to Indonesia for a few years, and later in the summer Virgile and Sterling will leave for Greece and their first posting.

[caption id="attachment_31" align="alignright" width="300" caption="King of the mountain"]<img class="size-medium wp-image-31" title="DSCN0067" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/DSCN0067-300x224.jpg" alt="King of the mountain" width="300" height="224" />[/caption]

I'm so happy with all of this that it sometimes makes me feel like the king of the mountain. In fact, I've reached a point in my life when I'm actually ready to go home again -- or at least go close to home. You see, through all my years of unhappiness in my younger days, I always dreamed of living in California.

I don't know exactly why. Maybe it was all those Beach Boys songs, or maybe it was just that I saw California as the only place in my life where nothing bad had ever happened. Of course I was less than a year old when my parents moved away from where I was born, so I probably wouldn't know if anything had. Sometimes that's enough.

The problem was, as the old song goes, that I could get back to the place but not the time. I have started reading Kevin Starr's wonderful history <a title="Golden Dreams" href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/california" target="_self">"Golden Dreams,"</a> which tells the California story in the era 1950-63. I was born a month before the beginning of that era and was 14 when it ended. That was when I really wanted to be here, not 1990 when the dream was slipping away for so many people.

It is certainly possible that I came here to get as far away as I could from my broken first marriage, or from all the twisted and failed dreams of my younger days. But all that is past now and I want to be closer to the people I love and the people who love me.

So we'll move, and that brings to mind a nice Jodee Messina song from a few years back.

<em>"Heads, Carolina, Tails, California. Somewhere greener, somewhere warmer. Up in the mountains, down by the ocean. Where? It don't matter, as long as we're goin' ..."</em>

We've got a few choices. Nicole and I both want to live in an "active-adult" community, and we have been researching a couple of new ones the Del Webb organization is building in the Southeast. There's Carolina Lakes, which is just southwest of Charlotte, N.C., across the border in South Carolina, and there's Lake Providence, just outside of Nashville in Tennessee.

When we go to Virginia for Christmas, we're going to take an extra week after the first of the year to scout both of them out. In all likelihood, we'll pick one of the two and buy a lot along with a floor plan. The Webb people will build the house and we'll move there sometime next year. In either place, we'