Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. So, And then Now, This is a story of two parts. The first is my own story, told from the perspective of my 11-year-old self,

while the second part is told from that of my late fathers.

In September of 1989, just after my 11th birthday,

my parents loaded up all of our stuff into a car and moved

us all the way from Pennsylvania, Steel Country, to Rhode Island.

The move was sudden, to say the least, and neither myself nor my older sister were

particularly happy about it but mom explained that dad had secured a very good job

out there and we could use the extra money to buy us new bikes, horse riding lessons, and all that good stuff, you get the idea.

So we get there, and the house was amazing.

It was brand new, but still looked super old and fancy, and according to my parents, the best thing was that it was free.

The house was provided for anyone who held the position my dad had recently acquired,

which was the vice principal of the very fancy private school we'd be going to.

That didn't really mean much to us kids, though.

We were more than swayed by the promise of new bikes, but the thing that really won us over were our new bedrooms.

They were huge compared to our old rooms, and when mom and dad said that we could help furnish

them ourselves on a little trip into Newport, me and my sister were walking on air.

We'd gone from very unhappy about the move to positively ecstatic, but as time went on,

things started to seem really, really off.

The first thing I noticed was how our new place was compared to all the other homes and buildings around the township. The place was nothing but

old money New England elite and it had the architecture to match. Most homes dated back to the

1800s and some of the older cottages were built back to the 1680s.

We weren't exactly complaining about that, better to live in some new build than some rickety old

...