Welcome to strangers from KCW and Radiotopia. I'm Leah Tao. And at the end of our last show,

I told you guys that we'd be doing new and better versions of a two-part story from our first season

for this episode and the next one. But when I listened back to that two-parter, I discovered, first of all,

that it needed a lot of work.

And also that I think it should be one story and not two.

So I'm working to transform it into a single story, and in the meantime, I'm going to share another story from our first season that I've always liked,

and that seems rather appropriate to share right now.

So that's the story

you'll hear today. We've fixed it up for you a bit, and here it is with my original

introduction. I've spent most of my adult life around people like myself who left their

small town for the big city.

And I've always wondered, why is it that some people just can't wait to get out of their hometown?

And others never want to leave.

And for those of us who did leave, what were we seeking and did we find it?

And at what cost? These questions have been coming up

recently as my friends and I started hitting 40, and I've noticed a change where the sort of

disdain we had for the hometown life has been replaced by a certain nostalgia. In some cases, even moments of doubt late at

night about that choice we made so many years ago to go be strangers in a new world and try

to make it our own, and whether that choice was the right one. Some of us have children

who rarely see their grandparents

because we're so far away, and sometimes they barely see their parents because we work

all the time. Others have no kids, perhaps because they chose not to, or perhaps because

...