From the Ohio Country and Into the World

“Why oh why oh why oh, did we ever leave Ohio…“ (Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green from 1953’s Wonderful Town ) --- I have thought a lot about that question since I traded home for an itinerant lifestyle more than 8,000 days ago. Ohio increasingly occupies my thoughts after years of moving and travel. As a relatively new father, I have an unexplainable new compulsion to understand the Buckeye state I will always call home. That’s why Youngstown (in Ohio's Western Reserve region) and not England, Italy, Mozambique, Virginia, Maryland, Brazil, Afghanistan, or Finland is the source of my first blog post. And why not Youngstown or the Western Reserve of Ohio? There’s no lonely planet. We are lumped into the “Rust Belt” or “flyover,” a land dominated by coverage of unemployed white male factory workers, heroin, and people in MAGA garb. In the just released "the Best Coffee in Every State 2019," Food and Wine notes,  "There are so many places in