The Land of Logan

The title of this entry is a blatant plagiarism from my good friend and fellow Logan Countian, Jim Turner. Jim is the editor of the News Democrat and Logan Leader based in Logan County, Kentucky. I am still a faithful reader of this paper despite the fact that I have lived as an expatriate for the last decade. Jim's articles, the entire paper in fact, help me to feel a little more connected to home.

What is that is within us that makes us yearn for home? Wars are fought to defend our home from those that would take our home from us. Politicians make great hay about their common roots. Presidents at one point ballyhooed that they were born in a log cabin starting with William Henry Harrison, continuing with Abe Lincoln and ending with Jimmy Carter(the first president to be born in a hospital. (Feel free to check on the Carter birth I found it from two different sources and still find it hard to believe.)

My natural cynicism says that time and distance may have rewritten enough of the past that what was once appalling is now appealing. The currents of time have dulled the heartaches and dampened the disappointments.

Or perhaps, I view that life as simpler because it really was simpler. In life we make choices as we grow, more as we age, and only as we look back do we realize how wonderful it was back in our glory days. I, and I believe most, would not go back to younger days without that which we have acquired. For example I would not trade my wife and children for the chance to return to those simpler times, but being married and raising a son and daughter are difficult tasks that the sixteen year old version of me did not face. Back then it was the scrounging enough money to take a girl on a date and then finding a girl that would actually say yes. That was an excruciating experience but now as I look to the future I know that some little girl will bat her eyes at my son and then my life will take on a whole new version of complicated.

As for my daughter, she will never date and stay with her father forever.

So I pose the question were the good old days that good or has, as the song goes, "time rewritten every line"?