That’s two dad posts that found so much material they never got to where I wanted to end up. So let’s continue.

After he graduated law school he returned to our hometown, a county seat, and joined a law firm that probably had about 5 or 6 partners at that point. Been there since, never lived more than a 3 minute commute away.

Wasn’t actually his birth town, that was Ithaca. His dad moved down when mine was young to um, own a feedstock business, I think? Or maybe manage one his unmarried aunt or sister owned? As long as I knew him he was just old on a full-time basis. Anyway, ever since, I guess going to Cornell has been swimming back upstream to the spawning grounds for us.

(I don’t know if my grandfather was ever in the military. I should ask. I don’t think he was in WWII, it didn’t come up in the stories my dad told of going over to the houses of professors who’d give kids cookies only to find them gone off to what he later realized was the Manhattan Project.

The male line on my other side is Navy engineers. That grandfather signed up in WWII and got sent to Hawaii to build golf courses. [They were staffing up and there were formulas for building 9 holes for every so many officers Colonel and above, the idea was the brass should always have an open tee time.] Ended up being a state legislator for a bit despite the fact that he’s not that great with ideas, grammar, or even spelling. I guess that’s what secretaries were for. That and class miscegenation.)

I was born into that town just after shopping centers and malls devastated downtown shopping. In my teens the farmland of the region got developed as exurbs both for Philly white flight and South Jersey bio/chem/telecom tax refugees. By the 2000s I think it was getting Manhattan commuters, which is INSANE.

They got a “resort town” designation from the state, lifted the per capita cap on liquor licenses, redeveloped the downtown as the nightlife destination for all this. In my life it went from dingy to decent to ridiculous, boutiquey stuff for people who own exactly one horse. It’s impressive how some fake gaslights and wooden signs can make the same architecture that used to look hella ‘70s look hella quaint, “historic” in quotes, referencing “history” more than any actual period.

I am very much my father’s son. My dad was 45 when I was born, as far as I know his first and only child. So he’s of a generation or at least a half older than a lot of my peers’, carries around cultural assumptions according that I’ve inherited. All this is to account for a lot of who I am - growing up the squire of country gentry and finding out that not only did I not inherit the role by default but it barely existed to even claim anymore. And that’s part of why I like Oregon so much, that it’s sorta an open frontier where that dream – all previous American dreams, really, it’s kinda weird – still exists.

(Now that Portland’s having its moment it’s funny that it’s this icon of progressivism. Yes, but Progressive as in Era - a permissive-technocratic system that relies heavily on the fact that Germanic masculine primacy is not only upheld, it’s never seriously been threatened.)

Don’t be fooled though, for whatever identity I’m professing at the time I can work up a compelling story about how My History Obviously Led To This. After all, it did, didn’t it?