Seeger & Springsteen

In case anyone missed Sunday's inaugural festivities, I highly recommend taking a look at Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen's inspiring rendition of "This Land Is Your Land." Although I hadn't sung or even thought about the lyric in years, I was amazed at how quickly it came back to me as the music played.

Beyond whetting my appetite for Tuesday's inauguration, it also transported back to my kindergarten days during the U.S. Bicentennial. At the end of the school year we put on a pageant celebrating Amercia's 200th birthday, for which we learned and sung various patriotic ditties. I vividly recall stomping around with a toy rifle on my shoulder, singing "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again." But my favorite memory is the grand finale, when we all stood on the risers and belted out "This Land Is Your Land," to our enthusiastic parents, though only the first couple of verses. There was nothing about "relief offices" in the lyric we learned, and I'm glad I was able to hold onto my innocence about those things for at least a little bit longer.