My dad and stepmom didn’t consult me when they decided to move to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. I must’ve been 15 when they told me they were moving. At the time, they lived in Roanoke, VA, my hometown, in my stepmom, Ginger’s, childhood home. We had all lived in Roanoke for my whole life, so I never thought there was a chance that we would live anywhere else, but there was, and we did.

At 15, I wasn’t going to get too caught up in the details of their decision. I lived with my mom anyway. Another healthcare company had bought the clinic that supported my dad’s group practice, and they were in the process of squeezing him out. It was a money thing; it was a power thing. According to some vague (to me) non-compete agreement, Dad could choose to work for them or move somewhere 100 miles away, so they doubled it and headed 200 miles north to a place I had never heard of — Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, a sleepy little town so south central it was practically Maryland.

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My dad’s former business partner, another family practice doc named Jim, had left Roanoke years before and started a practice there. He had family in PA, so it made sense for him. After 20 years in Roanoke, my dad bought into that practice and started rebuilding. Eventually (and I’m only now realizing that this must have been difficult and even intimidating for him), he had cemented himself in the community there, as beloved as he had been in Roanoke (where, even now, his name can still ignite a flicker of recognition in certain circles).

Things sort of went sideways with my mom for a while, so I went to live with Dad and Ginger during what would have been my senior year of high school. Instead of a senior year, I started as a freshman at Penn State Mont Alto and got a job as a waitress in a diner whose owners were friends of the family.

It was hard living in Chambersburg—a different kind of boring isolation than the flavor I grew up on in Roanoke. The smell of manure lingered in the air. It would make my eyes water the first time I stepped outside each morning, but by the afternoon, I would have grown used to the smell of shit all around me. Even though they could have lived anywhere, Dad and Ginger chose a generic new construction in a super lame subdivision a block down from Jim’s family. I have very few fond memories of the place and no desire to ever return.

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My dad spent the last 20-ish years of his life in Chambersburg. He died watching tv in his recliner just a couple weeks short of his 65th birthday, on what would have been the cusp of his retirement, had he been seriously considering retiring. He should have been, considering it I mean, but I don’t know if he was.

At my dad’s funeral, I learned: Chambersburg loved my dad. They told me again and again, cupping their soft warm hands around mine and trying to give me their memories of him. I felt empty, you know, bereft. I wasn’t listening to their stories, but I remember one of them: A scrawny guy in his 50s came up to us. He couldn’t have been smoking because we were inside the funeral home, but in my memory, he’s gesturing with a cigarette. He told us about my dad, how he had cared for the man’s wife, a morbidly obese shut-in who was being (and had subsequently been) devoured by her own medical problems. What he wanted to tell us was that my dad never shamed her. He treated her with dignity, something it seems like no one else had bothered to do.

That man, like many of my dad’s patients, worked for Martin’s. In 2017, Martin’s employed around 500 people, and the docs and PA’s in my dad’s practice took turns providing medical care for them on-site. A lot of Martin’s workers showed up for Dad’s funeral, and I was surprised by how much that meant to me. He was, in some cases, the source of the only medical care they had ever known, and he was gone suddenly, leaving them to process their grief and fear. I understood that deeply.

In the years that followed, seeing a Martin’s logo always brought that back for me, that sense that I shared my grief with a few hundred people whose lives were touched by my dad. Sharing grief is like a kind of magic spell that binds people to each other. Martin’s bread became a kind of talisman for me and my family, and we filled our carb drawer with their burger and hotdog buns, their squishy white bread, and their hoagie rolls because, not only were they texturally superior to the competition, they were somehow specifically mine. I felt a hereditary claim to them.

Well now here we are. If you follow food or politics or eat burgers, you’ve probably heard that “potato roll magnate“ Jim Martin, is a major donor to Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano’s campaign, donating over $100k to the pro-Trump candidate who denied the results of the 2020 election, stoked the January 6th insurrection, and recently introduced a ‘heartbeat bill‘ to outlaw abortion. Martin’s is a family-owned and operated business, and the connections between the Martins and the Mastriano family are many.

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It’s more than enough to send us searching the bread aisle for other options. Burger chains all over the country (including the local homies at Cobra Burger here in Richmond) are announcing that they’ll no longer use Martin’s products. Many of us find ourselves in the same position—staring down our last few bags of the yeasty masterpieces before we have to reconcile what we know now with what we’ve been doing for years and start making changes.

When my Dad died, I began the process of understanding that I never really knew him. I knew him as an every-other-weekend-and-some-holidays parent. I knew him as Ginger’s husband. I knew him as someone who worked hard and made people laugh and rarely complained. I knew him as someone who loved music and science fiction and bagels. I knew he was good at what he did. But I couldn’t honestly say I had any grasp on his inner workings. What did he believe about religion? What were his politics? What really mattered to him? I didn’t know any of that stuff.

On the Sundays I spent at his house as a kid, we’d watch Meet the Press together and talk about politics. He taught me that banning abortions only means banning safe abortions. He taught me that gay people deserve equal rights and respect (and introduced me to the first person I ever knew of as gay, a circus conductor named Señor Rai, whose Harvey Fierstein voice was like strange and enchanting music to my eight year old ears). (I googled him while writing this and found this Roanoke Times article from 1992, the year I met him. A small thrill.) Dad was what I would have called fiscally conservative, perhaps a bit more concerned with the stock market than the labor force, but ultimately unwilling to interfere in anyone’s personal lives. Ultimately good.

But after Dad died, Ginger seemed to steep in her conservatism. It was like that was all that was left of her personality (that and her dogs). She posted right-wing memes and outright lies on her Facebook page (which was a blessing of sorts because it made me take Facebook off my phone and replace it with Libby, so I ended up reading a lot of books instead of getting triggered every time I opened my phone.) She, arguably the expert on my Dad’s later life, became an unreliable, maybe even unsafe, source of information about him, and I realized that I would never have the chance to really know who he was. I could piece together evidence, but I’d never really know.

It’s relatively easy to walk away from Martin’s because, even though it’s my grocery store bread of choice, it’s just that. It’s bread. I can find something else. I could even make it myself. But there’s a lot of baggage for me around my dad and his politics. There are questions to which I’ll probably never find a satisfying answer. I wasn’t terribly close to him when he passed away, but he was my dad after all, and I revered him, and saying goodbye to Martin’s now feels like another one of the several painful ways in which I’ve had to say goodbye to him over and over again.

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