A new adventure

On living in Arkansas and moving to New Jersey.

A coffee shop in Bentonville, Arkansas is one of the last places I expected to see someone donning a San Francisco Giants hat.

I try not to interrupt people when they’re working, but I lasted about 30 seconds before breaking the silence.

“Are you from the Bay Area?” I asked.

“Yeah, I grew up there. Do you know Daly City?”

A few moments before our conversation began, I finished a phone call with one of my best friends. He was raised in Daly City about 10 minutes away from my house in San Francisco, and we went to middle school at St. Stephen’s and high school at St. Ignatius together.

“I was just on the phone with my friend from Daly City, he grew up right behind Westlake Joe’s.”

Ten minutes later, I learned this man with the Giants hat also attended St. Stephen’s, a middle school that produces about 35 graduates a year, and had fond memories of listening to KNBR growing up. 

We traded stories of how we ended up in Bentonville –he, like most people here, works for Walmart– and then bid a quick farewell.

He’s surely not the only other San Franciscan who calls Bentonville home, but he’s the first I’d met here.

And this week, our small club is contracting.

On Thursday, my girlfriend and I will set out in a U-Haul for Princeton, New Jersey. 

It’s the next chapter of a story with twists and turns I never saw coming. 

Two years ago, I thought I was destined to spend the rest of my life in San Francisco. I was eager to leave the Giants beat and write columns for the Mercury News and I was hopeful that I could turn my part-time hosting gig at KNBR into a full-time job. 

In October, 2021, I covered the first-ever playoff series between the Giants and Dodgers for a newspaper, appeared as a pregame analyst on TV and hosted postgame shows on the radio. I was working 12-to-14 hours per day, but I was completely consumed with a dream knowing that the finish line was in sight.

When the series ended with Gabe Morales ringing Wilmer Flores up on a check swing, I was quietly transitioning to a new role at the paper and auditioning for a gig as the KNBR Tonight host.

By the time spring training started, my life looked completely different.

A week after the NLDS ended, I went on my first date with my girlfriend, Rachel. And in January, 2022, I was diagnosed with epilepsy after suffering a pair of major seizures that led to ambulance rides and emergency room visits.

The diagnosis temporarily cost me my driver’s license, my ability to work from loud, crowded stadiums and in many ways, my confidence. 

How could I be useful to a sports department without the ability to cover practices and games in person? How could I make a decent living if I needed to reduce my hours on the radio? And most importantly, how would I adjust to a new reality in which I thought about the possibility of having another seizure on a near-hourly basis?

To make a long story much shorter, Rachel and I began the process of starting over.

As she applied to graduate school programs and I overhauled my life, we moved to her hometown of Bentonville.

And after a year in a state I never would have believed I’d call home, I’m sad to say goodbye.

(As an aside: Bentonville is an extraordinarily complex place that’s a worthy subject of a Michael Lewis book.)

I’m thrilled for our move, but I’ll miss living in a beautiful place that gave me an appreciation for different perspectives. I’ll miss telling people I live in Arkansas, and hearing the shocked, dismissive or even disgusted tone that says a lot about the way a person perceives an unfamiliar place.

“Why Arkansas? Why would you ever live there?”

Those are questions I’ve spent the last year answering, and I’m happy I’ve had the opportunity.

I think it’s important to tell people that question the lifestyle here about the pro-choice rallies I attended after Roe was overturned. I like seeing how outsiders react to details about the Pride event I went to at a packed church last month. And I have appreciated the chance to welcome friends into town who see their preconceived notions of Arkansas disappear in an instant, just as mine did when I arrived.

What’s considered any other flyover state where I’m from quickly became a place I was proud to call home. 

As we take off for New Jersey, I’m grateful because I’m finally healthy. I still have epilepsy, I still take daily medication and I’m not quite able to live the lifestyle I once did, but I appreciate and value a new sense of normalcy made possible by my family, by Rachel and by Arkansas.

Time to go searching for Giants hats elsewhere.