My opening plaint of yesterday – Why do I live in New York State? – inevitably prompted several readers to ask: “Well, why do you?”

Well, inertia has something to do with it. Mostly, though, it’s work. I’m a freelance writer. I have to give face time to editors, publishers, and the like. New York is just the best place to do that. For all you hear about technology having abolished distance, that stuff still matters, down at my level at any rate.

Of the 30 or so e-mails I received on this theme, several readers recommended their own states. Way out ahead of the pack here was South Carolina. What’s going on down there? Is it really as nice as they’re telling me? I looked it up in my 1961 edition of Earl Schenk Miers Our Fifty States:

“The Palmetto State” … The first settlement by white men (1526) [I bet they don’t teach that in the schools any more!], the first ship built in America to cross the Atlantic (1562-63), the first free library (1698) … Deerskins became the bulwark of a flourishing business in pelts … A tradition of refined social life emerged … Stede Bonnet, the “gentleman pirate” who, it was said, was driven to his seamy profession to escape a nagging wife, ended his career dangling from a rope on Charleston’s Battery … Under the compelling statesmanship of John C. Calhoun, South Carolina kept its position firm in the senatorial battles with Henry Clay and Daniel Webster … [then, yep, Fort Sumter, and I think I know the rest].
The state’s motto, Dum Spiro, Spero means “While I breathe, I hope.” And the state’s spirit is exemplified in the words of its song written by Henry Timrod, a distinguished poet: “Call on the children of the hill; ⁄ Wake swamp and river, coast and rill, ⁄ Rouse all they strength and all thy skill; ⁄ Carolina! Carolina!”

Sounds pretty nice. Assuming things down there haven’t changed much since 1961, I may give it a try.