My First College Assignment: Why Do You Love La Mesa?

I just completed my first week of college, and one of my classes is a seminar of twenty students from the University Honors program. We come from all different backgrounds, whether it is ethnicity, our home state, or social class.

We share one thing in common: we are all college freshmen, and we are all transitioning from moving away from home to college.

To start off the semester, our professor posed a question: “Where are you from?”

Each student stood up and shared what they wrote. Some students discussed having their parents divorce, or dealing with poverty and homelessness. Others talked about how their parents pushed them to achieve their highest potential. A lot talked about the role of God in their lives.

Nobody wrote about the town they grew up in.

I thought this was interesting. Wouldn’t someone in a class of twenty bring up their hometown? None of us are from Greeley, Colorado, the city where our school is located, so each of us has moved to a new town.

That’s when I realized that home is not geographic. Home is family, traditions, and culture.

This was relieving to me, who has spent the past two weeks wondering if moving to Colorado for school was turning my back on my hometown.

I have grown up in La Mesa for eighteen years, and it’s been strange to leave. I miss the familiarity, the comfort, and the traditions.

I grew up going to the car show in the Village, where my family always ate dinner at Sanfillippo’s. We went to Oktoberfest and Christmas in the Village. I played softball for La Mesa Bobby Sox and Valley Mesa softball since the age of four. I loved going Grossmont mall when I was a middle schooler, and then the Starbucks on Baltimore Street became my hangout in high school. And my pride in Helix has always been strong, even now in college. I love La Mesa, and I am proud to call it my home.

That’s why leaving has been such a struggle. Because I call La Mesa my home, but I live on a college campus in Greeley.

I think that it is not the physical streets of La Mesa that make it my home, but the traditions that I described before. It’s the things that I grew up doing, and the people that I met.

I think that’s why nobody in my class talked about the actual geography of “where they are from,” but about what was sentimental to them.

I took the time to write this because I wanted other people to stop and think about why they are proud to be a La Mesan. Our city is a safe, clean place to live and we should be thankful for that, but is there something about our small community within the big county of San Diego that makes us proud to be from La Mesa?