A is Oxford, B is Windham.

I blogged a few years back about how Camille Paglia lived, for a time, in my hometown of Oxford, NY.

Turns out I had another someday-would-be-famous neighbor — not quite so close as in the same town, but I’m still counting it :-)

Scott Adams, who is three or four years older than me, grew up in Windham, NY.

Windham is about an hour and forty five minute’s drive from Oxford. That sounds like a lot except that the driving consists of winding through 2-lane mountain roads. I speak from experience. Delhi, NY, about halfway between the two towns, was (is?) one of the schools in the same sports section and division as Oxford; anyone who played or spectated Oxford sports was in Delhi several times a year during high school. I remember it as being the looooooong bus ride :-)

And Route 23, the main road into Windham, is well known to Oxfordians. It’s one of the main highways out of Norwich, the Chenango County seat.

As Upstate NY towns go, I don’t need to see Windham to know it has a lot in common with Oxford, although it’s probably a bit smaller (Adams writes in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life that he had 40 people in his graduating class).

In his book, Adams tells a story of how his car broke down once between home and Syracuse on a “newly constructed highway through a sparsely populated valley in the Catskill Mountains.” I have to think that’s Route I-88, right?

Here’s a WaPo article by Adams — one of several that have appeared lately that are excerpted from his book. I read it today, because of course I want to be happy, and which reminded me that How to Fail… was on my TBR pile.

Highly recommend the book if you’re looking for some New Year’s encouragement :-)