Podcast - Songs & Stories From Home

Dear Partner, 

For the past twenty-six years we have gotten together for a meal the Monday after Thanksgiving.

After a Thanksgiving greeting and the song Thankful I will be sharing another Dear Partner letter written to my longtime friend, Mike McCoy. 

Dear Partner,

Who would have thought or could have imagined in the fall of 1965 that two kids, one from Spokane and the other from Sumner, with football scholarships to the University of Washington, would today, at least figuratively, be sitting on that park bench Paul Simon wrote about all those years ago thinking indeed how terribly strange it is to be 70, or in our case in our 70’s.

We are on the eve of a truly significant election. How this county will approach the Pandemic going forward, how we’ll deal with Global Warming, Systemic Racism; these are all on the ballot. We’re deciding whether character in our leaders still matters. 

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. A pledge totaling thirty-one words that many if not most of us first recited in grade school standing next to our desks with our hands over our hearts.

What do we mean when we end the Pledge of Allegiance with the words Liberty and Justice for All? When it comes to liberty we are a country steeped in myths of hearty individualism and personal freedom, ideas we often express loudly and boldly.

Welcome to Songs and Stories from Home. It’s October of 2020. An election is upon us, and I would urge everyone that’s eligible to register to vote and then to vote in person or by mail. What voting can do is gives us, we the people, a voice so that together we may continue to give voice to the ASPIRATIONS OF A NATION.

As we complete this journey around the fountain that celebrates the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s, as we share songs and stories that bring to life what is etched in stone, I am filled with both gratitude and grief.

This Podcast is being shared at the end of September of 2020 just a few weeks before a Presidential election that will in many ways from small to significant define and decide the future and the fate of our country, of the country my grandchildren, our grandchildren, will inherit.