Yesterday Mrs. The Fyd drove our dependable car, myself navigating, down to Roseburg, Oregon. There we had Easter lunch with my grandmother and father. On the way back up to Portland I reflected on the fact that now my grandmother is planning on moving down to Sacramento this summer, I would no longer have to make the long trip down to Roseburg several times each year.

Since I moved to Portland in 1987 to attend college, the obligation of getting myself down to Roseburg to visit the grandparents has become increasingly onerous. A boring three-hour drive (or at least five hours on Greyhound, before I swore off their felon-riddled service) down to an ugly, bigoted little town squatting at the base of clear-cut hills. But now I am free.

I will miss portions of the trip -- stretches of forested landscape, the Enchanted Forest I've never visited, the billboard urging "Get The U.S. out of the U.N.!" And the evening in Salem when several Greyhound drivers beat the crap out of a drunk. But it's mostly Willamette Valley farmland along one hundred and eighty miles of I5, and after the first dozen trips it gets all samey.

Then this evening I realized that both my parents, having spent almost all their adult lives in Europe, have now moved back to the states of their births and upbringings, my mother to New Jersey, my father to California (and he even moved to Sacramento, the city of his origin). I myself obviously have a city of birth, but the upbringing is spread across too many cities and countries for any single one to claim precedence.