Loyal Scaiaholics know how contemplative I get around anniversaries [We still don’t have those jetpacks]. The other day, some Facebook memories were presented to me of an affair some associates threw to celebrate my move from Houston to DFW.

A move that took place way back in aught-nine. Ten years ago this week.

Barack Obama was president. The Philadelphia Phillies were defending World Series champions.

And a bar in Houston was willing to celebrate my new job by filling a trophy on their mantel with beer.

An associate negotiated the deal with the bartender, leading to this strangely intricate hand-off/photo opp.

We’re all now in our 30s, so maybe we don’t drink as many trophy brews as we used to, but that trophy and I have been on a lot of adventures since that night in aught-nine.

The trophy has become the prize for my fantasy baseball league and has traversed international borders.

But when those Facebook memories popped up, I started feeling ways about things.

I came to DFW to go to work at WBAP, but, ironically, the first place I ever stopped in North Texas was the KRLD newsroom.

Scott Braddock, sitting next to me in that picture, and I had worked together in Houston. He made his way to DFW a few months before me, so when I made my first trip to North Texas, he offered to let me stay at his place while I was looking for apartments.

He worked at KRLD at the time, and I pulled into town near the end of his shift, so the first place I stopped was their studio.

I had moved around a bunch and considered DFW just the next stop in my career.

But ten years later, DFW feels like home. After that car crash [which I am still skeptical actually happened], my friends and family kept telling me how everyone in town was pulling for me, even though Mama Scaia’s edict to my family and friends, “Don’t tell him how randy and racist he was,” suggests my behavior was less than ideal when my brain wasn’t working so great.

Just this past week, when Roger Emrich passed away, I remembered him coming up to me during the World Series [remember when the Texas Rangers had a team?!] and introducing himself. He said he heard me on WBAP all the time and was glad to put a face with the name.

That always stuck with me. He was glad to be a part of the community he was in.

I go back to visit Hermiston and Portland every year. I have friends in Houston, but the story seems to have flipped: I went from town to town to be a radio news reporter [so much so, my brother even got me a Johnny Fever mug a few years ago]. Now, the way people get their information is changing, and I have no idea if radio news will be the career I retire from, but DFW is home.

Braddock had the sense to leave radio. Maybe I’ll start focus groups soon on what kind of podcast you, the Loyal Scaiaholic, would listen to. And I’ll start other focus groups on how someone launches a podcast and what, exactly, a “podcast” is.

I’m not an old man for putting “podcast” in quotes. Or for referring to 2009 as “aught-nine.”