This past week I often found myself thinking about an upcoming anniversary. Today would have been Dad's 100th birthday. This is one of the mental ramblings that I have from time to time and have reservations about blogging about. What changed my mind or convinced me to give it a try? Here goes.

Yesterday was Woody Guthrie's 100th birthday. It is interesting to make note of the peers of one's parents. Okemah, OK is a far distance from Becker, MN, but one only wonders if many of the same forces may have been in play in both settings leading up to the dust bowl in the Great Plains which, one can only surmise, may well have reached into the sand country of central Minnesota. Woody and Dad shared a common socio-political-cultural America during a substantial and very tumultuous period of the 20th century. A cursory review of their individual biographies reveals very different responses to those environmental forces. I wonder if a closer read would reveal some quite unexpected similarities? The big events in history don't just happen to the men and women, who get to be named in history books or have their births commemorated by their hometowns, it also happens to those, who pass their lives with considerably less notoriety and have the anniversaries of their births and deaths noted only by immediate family members.

This week I have been reading Wendell Berry (Life is a Miracle). Happenstance, I can only presume. Woody's This Land Is Your Land is a heartfelt plea from a slightly different perspective than Berry's central question: "How can one become genuinely and honorably native to one's place?" The search for place continues from one generation to the next. Or is it that members of each generation must mount his or her own struggle to become native, that is, to become "at home?"