{"id":847,"date":"2011-12-25T00:01:36","date_gmt":"2011-12-25T05:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rockwellblake.com\/blog\/?p=847"},"modified":"2014-11-27T19:15:34","modified_gmt":"2014-11-27T23:15:34","slug":"where-i-come-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/2011\/12\/25\/where-i-come-from\/","title":{"rendered":"Where I come from."},"content":{"rendered":"

This is me!\u00a0I also appear on the Welcome Page proudly posing in front of the family garden.\u00a0 This\u00a0kid is still having fun even as an old man.\u00a0 These photos give you an idea of what it’s like up north of everybody else\u00a0in New York State.\u00a0 Black and white\u00a0photography\u00a0can capture most of the character of the shiver weather, but mosquito slapping weather here in the north is full of green that escapes that chemical retina.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Back when I was little, we northerners\u00a0used to be\u00a0insulated from mass invasion on nearly\u00a0every side but one.\u00a0 Canada is just a whistle stop or two\u00a0north of us.\u00a0\u00a0Our history has been impacted by this\u00a0 reality for as long as we have had a history to note.\u00a0 Not that we were noticed.\u00a0 That is until the Cold War caused an economic\u00a0boom\u00a0in Plattsburgh.\u00a0 Wow I remember my dad\u00a0putting me on the roof of his car to watch the HUGE earth moving machines creating\u00a0a\u00a0runway for\u00a0B 47s\u00a0and destroying the insular character of our forest hide away.\u00a0\u00a0In the fullness of time,\u00a0true to form, the Feds lost interest in that Air Force Base and handed it over to local authorities to play with as they saw fit.\u00a0 The damage\u00a0was already\u00a0done and we are now no more isolated than any other part of the country on the Interstate Highway System.\u00a0 By the way we are noticed now.\u00a0 <\/a>TV shows call our town a Hell Hole and the citizens here Rock Eaters.\u00a0 Also by the way, those TV shows who have us on their radar screens originate from New York City.\u00a0 We think of them as to\u00a0the extreme south.\u00a0 Read\u00a0my words\u00a0to mean\u00a0southerners.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The natural beauty of The North Country goes a long way to\u00a0recommend this area to prospective citizens, and blessed we are in that department.\u00a0 I’m really happy about this because\u00a0it was that natural\u00a0beauty that inspired my wife’s father to settle his family here.\u00a0 Well that’s not the only reason I’m happy God blessed this part of the world with outstanding natural attributes, but it’s a good one.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I want to introduce\u00a0my Dad:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

He and the plastic animals behind him are no longer with us.\u00a0 My Dad died a few years back.\u00a0 I miss him a lot. He supported me in everything I did as a kid until he caught me stealing apples.\u00a0\u00a0 He was a kind and\u00a0generous man who didn’t have much, but was open handed none the less.\u00a0 He even provided a pool when his brothers and sisters would come by to visit.\u00a0 My Dad had only one child.\u00a0 That\u00a0be me. (a little north country speak<\/em>)\u00a0 The rest of his siblings who got married worked a little harder at populating the Earth.\u00a0 Come to think of it, I believe that even the unmarried ones had a go at\u00a0this project, and\u00a0who can\u00a0say\u00a0they didn’t surpass my\u00a0Dad’s efforts?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

These kids soaking with me in the canvas pool represent\u00a0a\u00a0very small\u00a0percentage\u00a0of the cousins I can claim as family.\u00a0 I lost count a long time ago.\u00a0\u00a0Tenor that I was to become I knew that front and center was the power position.\u00a0 There I am down center front in profile with the dark hair.\u00a0 Would you look at that hair.\u00a0 Things do change don’t they.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Those\u00a0 shinning simple days in the 50s gave me a rock solid opinion that life as a poor person was certainly blessed, BUT!!!\u00a0\u00a0 How much fun we all had with near nothing and\u00a0I had clear\u00a0evidence that our parents were also well entertained.\u00a0 I\u00a0acquired an\u00a0ability to escape a personal predicament that seems to be a national\u00a0torture\u00a0in the\u00a0USA today.\u00a0 Well I will admit that History did not start with my birth and this problem has been with us even longer than the USA has been around.\u00a0I’ll get to that in the blogs that follow.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Did I mention I’m a tenor?\u00a0 I love tenor jokes.\u00a0 I also suffer from the deficiencies these jokes exploit to make you and me laugh.\u00a0 I’m going to leave the rest of\u00a0my story to the many Blogs I hope to write as I overcome, little by little, the intrinsic laziness with which we tenors are branded.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is me!\u00a0I also appear on the Welcome Page proudly posing in front of the family garden.\u00a0 This\u00a0kid is still having fun even as an old man.\u00a0 These photos give you an idea of what it’s like up north of everybody else\u00a0in New York State.\u00a0 Black and white\u00a0photography\u00a0can capture most of the character of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":849,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,55,52],"tags":[60,58,59,61],"class_list":["post-847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-living","category-personal-history","tag-north-country","tag-personal","tag-plattsburgh","tag-rock-eater"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/Blog-2.jpg?fit=6800%2C4533&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2kj1l-dF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847"}],"version-history":[{"count":66,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3592,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions\/3592"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}