I wasn’t there, but I imagine the summer of 1929 to be a hot and humid one, merely because that is how most summers are in Northern Minnesota, especially around the 4^th of July.  The countryside would certainly been different than the one that I knew growing up eighty-one years today, the day that my father was born.

The countryside that I grew up in, while the same latitude and longitude, would have been almost unrecognizable to the modern eye, while to my father, who has seen eighty-one years of change, the differences might be almost unperceived.  The trees and forests that covered that stretch of land and the humble homesteads connected by paths through the trees are the flat farm fields of today making a patchwork of the countryside, broken up only by those homesteads that have survived through luck, hard labor, or a little bit of both.

The nation was different too - 1929 would have been a time of innocents of sort for our country (or so we would like to believe) but also a time of enormous change.  The automobile was changing the landscape, and would have been neck and neck (pun intended) with the horse and carriage.  Telephones, common in places like Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York, would have to wait thirty plus years before hitting our little hamlet on the edge of the prairie.  Electricity would have to wait at least another ten years.

The countryside of my birth would have been filled with immigrants and adventurers, trying to make a go of it in a harsh land, beset by freezing cold winters and scorching summers, and enough trees to clear to give them work every day of the year.

Into was into this environment that my father was born, eighty-one years ago today, July 6^th, 1929.

Like that time, Dad has had to bridge some generations as well.

A devoted son, he left to see the world - serving in Korea and traveling through Japan in the service.  He wondered for a bit - working the harvest in southern Minnesota (Driving with Dad one day south of the cities, he casually glanced out at one of the little towns and said, “I camped over there.  Picking peas one summer”). He had dreams of the big city - using the GI Bill to become a machinist at Dunwoody and working in industry, until the siren call of home and family took him back into the north country.

Before he left, comfortable with the fact that he was going to be a bachelor for the rest of his life, some friends introduced this world wised country boy to a women ten years his junior, a fresh faced, though already toughened, city girl.  Two years later and they were married, living on the land that he had helped clear and wrestle from the wilderness.  For the next thirty plus years, he helped to set the standard for what being a good husband should be, until cancer wrestled the love of his life away.

He had children when most men were starting to enjoy their grandkids.  While his children went to school with the offspring of the ‘children of the sixties,’ he continued to tell them - and live for them - the value of hard work, of responsibility, of old fashioned stubbornness.

At eighty-one, Dad continues to reinvent himself in ways that few of any generation have been able to do.  In my lifetime, he has moved from the most dedicated of farmers, to retirement at sixty-five and a job in town, to now a devoted and hardworking member of the community still serving on boards and committees, and though moving a little slower due to COPD, he continues to think more clearly than most.

But even as I say he has ‘reinvented’ himself - in truth, the core, the root, the heart of the man hasn’t changed:  his unwavering faith in things not seen; his hope in people, and the ever changing world; his love of God, country and family.

Happy birthday Dad, and with admitted selfishness, I wish you many more to come.