Lisa and I are spending Thanksgiving in Casper with my mom and her husband of five years. It’s nice being back in the city of about 50,000 people where I went to high school and spent some summers and vacations during my undergrad days. (I didn’t actually spend a lot of time here as a young’un, but I feel like I “grew up” here, so that’s how I always answer that question.) Since we’re spending Christmas with Lisa’s parents in Oregon, in a couple days the little baby Jesus’s birthday will come, and we will help him open gifts. (Christgiving? Thanksmas? ThanXmas?)

I brought my camera with me — as is my modus operandi — but without any expectation of actually using it. I have a very clear idea how I want to present Massachusetts, but I prefer to travel with an open mind. Looking through the viewfinder forces editing or selecting experiences, and I’m trying to do a lot less of that as I go new places. But Casper isn’t exactly new to me, though every time I return home it feels ever more like déjà vu and less like I actually lived here.

So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that while driving home from work on Saturday I started thinking about rephotographic projects of the American West and about the fashion in documentary filmmaking of revisiting the town where one’s parents live in order to understand where we came from and how it has moved on without us and how we’ve diverged from it and how we never really know our parents or our town or . . . you get the idea.

Tuesday, Lisa and I went on my own rephotographic project, visiting the places that were common to me when I lived here: the old house, the houses of my friends, my high school, the Burger King where I used to work, the office where my mother worked and where I helped out, the top of the hospital parking garage. Other places we stopped stuck out in my mind, and I fully expected unmet expectations: I didn’t think there would be a woman in a bikini outside the Tokyo Massage picking up the day’s mail as I saw on my way ot Yellowstone many years ago, for example. (Not today.) Many places were mostly the same with some subtle differences. Banks change ownership. Mini Marts are now Loaf’N Jug stores. Herbo’s (I still have indigestion from eating there in 1992) continues to boast the “worst food and service in town” but is now the “Pork ‘N Bee’s” diner. Others were completely different. Dr. Spokes Cyclery is gone, replaced by a store selling Orvis clothing.

There’s a lot of new development on the east side of town: houses and big box stores. In fact, Casper feels more like other parts of the U.S. now than it did in the past. I can’t tell if downtown is suffering because of these changes or just changing, evolving into a caricature of its past or a stop on the modern trail westward to Yellowstone. New public art downtown suggests surpluses and civic pride, though the defacement of Chief Washakie’s statue suggests some things take longer to change than where people live or shop.

When I get back to the Bay State, we’ll see what develops and I will post photos that probably mean very little for most of you. I know, you can hardly wait.