I have a lot of respect for the women who hit young adulthood in the 50's. To be a kid during the Depression... thrown into a new world with the War... then another savage shift struck them, often as young Mothers, in the 50's. As you say, "To embrace or at least manage change, to provide support through uncertain times...." My own Mum, in 1950 a young college Fine Arts hotshot... then over just 10 years, to pass through NYC & London, and end up on a farm in a village of 400... collecting 4 plus 2 kids... taking up school-teaching as the only salaried earner... shifting from atheism to conservative Baptist. A "practical, flexible handle on living & maintaining what's important" indeed.

I've had decades to figure out that trajectory, read the books, asked lots of questions, but it must have felt like being strapped to a rocket. And now, to see her kids throw off the conservatism she adopted & take on entirely different ways of life... and yet, much of her moral core, basic virtues like justice, honesty, carrying on in new forms. (Well, in the sibs at least.)

I suspect I'll never understand the lives of those women like Madelyn & my Mum, but WHAT a journey. People I've come to think of with much greater respect, and pride, than I would ever have imagined as a kid. Better call the Hurricane tonight. That's her. She'll have an opinion. And I probably better listen.

When you're on, you're really on.

Thank you.

Goddamnit Des. I'm already overly emotional today and you had to throw this in there?

...and just catching a glimpse of Canaan as he crosses the River Jordan, knowing she wouldn't make it there herself. Perhaps it's best this way - she'll only know the promise of what's to come...

don't know much if anything about the Dunhams' politics, but I do chuckle a bit when I hear that Ann Dunham was "from Kansas". Sure, like a little less than the Joads were from Oklahoma, moving out at 3.

Don't chuckle... as someone who has personal roots and relatives, and lived in Kansas, I can tell you Stanley Ann Dunham (and Barack, for that matter) was shaped far more by the Kansas values of Madelyn and her husband Stanley, who until well into their adulthood lived in Kansas. The Dunhams were not the fictional dust-bowl-fleeing-Okies-from-Muskogee Joads from "Grapes of Wrath." But they shared certain essential values. Values that never leave you.

Little Stanley Ann got Kansas values instilled at the breakfast table and Sunday dinner. Do you think she and her parents never went back to El Dorado, or Wichita or Hutchinson to see the other relatives family friends?

No matter how far that family may have moved in search of a good life, a better life, the "American Dream Life," the basic kindness and goodness of Kansans went with them. It is that fundamental understanding that you can always make room at the table for one more. That sharing is better than hoarding. That sense is embodied in that scene in the "Grapes of Wrath" where the family, arriving in one of the migrant labor camps, has food -- barely enough for them -- but the mother, after feeding her brood, sends the hungry children in the camp off in search of tin cans or something, anything to put a gravy on. On little girl cries out gleefully, "the lady's gonna feed us!"

Madelyn and Stanley poured everything not just into Barack, but his mother. Madelyn kept Stanley Ann's dreams and hope alive. Even when she didn't choose a nice, safe boy from Kansas to settle down with, even when she found her dreams in far-away Indonesia, even when it meant that Madelyn became "Mom" again to raise the brown-skinned, kinky-haired boy with the funny name. She called him Barry. He called her "Toot."