My girlfriend said that when I got home, her son, a high school senior, would be doing homework with his friends. Right, I thought. Homework with his friends. Mothers will believe anything. When I got home, her son and two friends were sitting at the dining room table doing their chemistry homework.

They were drinking milk.

A golden retriever lay curled up at their feet.

My God, I thought: I’ve fallen into a time warp.

The town where we live covers 25 square miles of southern Vermont. In this town are three villages and other scattered clusters of houses. There are two paved roads; the rest are hard-packed dirt. They all wend through forests of oak, maple and pine, along brooks that run year-round. The population of the town is around 900. Last week I taught music at the elementary school for half a day as a sub: second, third and sixth grades. There were 17 kids in second grade, 16 in third and 14 in sixth. Now I’ve met all the second-, third- and sixth-graders in town.

The kids will go to school together from kindergarten through eighth grade. By then they will know each other like family and every teacher in school will know each one of them. When they get to high school, with kids from other towns, they’ll still stick together. Many of them will marry kids they went through school with, and if they move, it will likely as not be just down the road from where they grew up. This is not a retreat from the world. This is the way the world used to be, the way it still is for most people in the world. But it’s not the way I grew up and it’s not the way I’ve learned to think of America. I grew up in Cincinnati and Chicago, went to school in Portland, Ore., to more school in Boston and New York, then to jobs in Arizona, Texas, Mexico, Washington, D.C., Louisiana, New Mexico and Southern California.

That’s normal, isn’t it?

It is, for an American. I’m glad I’ve traveled so much. But when people ask me today where I come from, I don’t know what to say. I could say: Do you mean, lately? I could say: Do you mean, “Where was I born?” I feel like I come from the Great Southwest, but I didn’t get there till I was 27. I don’t come from there, really. I don’t come from Chicago or Cincinnati, either. After ten years in Southern California, I am glad I don’t come from there. Gertrude Stein was right: There’s no there, there.

Relax: I am not about to wrap this up with a statement of moral philosophy or phony wisdom. I have no conclusions to make. It’s just something I’ve noticed. It’s normal, I suppose, to feel bereft, rootless, depressed, after you’ve pulled up stakes, quit your job and moved 3,000 miles to a place where you know only one person and have no real prospects of work. I was feeling all those things, until they called me to work at the elementary school.

The second-graders trooped in, nearly all of them missing a few front teeth. Winging it, I showed them how to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the recorder. They all wanted to learn that one. It’s not as easy as it looks. Now here come the third-graders, with all the human types I remember from my school, Beechwoods Elementary: the shy skinny girl who looks like she’s going to cry; the chubby happy girl with dimples; the class cut-up who makes faces and tries to crack wise but he doesn’t know how yet; and something new for me -- a beautiful Japanese girl, eight years old with a serene nature and the face of an angel. I didn’t have a clue what to do, so I asked the kids. “Alabama Girl!” they shouted. “Alabama Girl!” “Let’s sing ‘Alabama Girl’,” I said, wisely. The kids formed two lines and launched into ‘Alabama Girl.’ They twirled and danced, girls with girls and boys with boys, except for the class cut-up, who preferred to dance with girls. They sang it over and over, a dozen times or so, until I applauded.

“Down by the Riverside!” they shouted.

“Let’s sing ‘Down by the Riverside,’” I said.

And off they went.

Then the sixth-graders trooped in. I figured they would be too cool for this, but I was wrong. They sang a three-part piece about the instruments in the orchestra and then sang the Vermont state song. They were good. They sat politely in a semicircle and waited for me to call the next tune. By the time I left the elementary school, whatever had been wrong with me was fixed. That night my girlfriend said, “What you did for those kids today was more important than editorial you ever wrote.” I thought: You’re wrong. It’s what they did for me.