This is Why.

 Someone sent me this article today, "Pardon Me if I Talk About Back Where I'm From."

I replaced Minnesota with Northwest Pennsylvania and Southwestern N.Y. (Eldred and surrounding area) and it became very lifelike to me. This is why I write and talk about my home community. I wish I had written these words, but they definitely made an impact and left a feeling of love and pride. 

"I spent the pandemic in New York where I don't know anybody except my wife so quarantine was no problem and after I got vaccinated I went home to Minnesota and had dinner with five people I've known forever or more, and it was a pleasure that's worth getting old for. With old friends, conversation is simple: you open your mouth and there's a big balloon of words. With new people, it's like a job interview. So I  love Minnesota where those old friends are. And it's a state that needs to be loved.

Minnesota is overlooked because we were brought up not to brag, not to toot our horn, not dance in the end zone. When a Minnesotan hits a grand-slam homer in the ninth to come from behind and win a championship, he trots around the bases, ignoring the roar of the crowd and crosses home plate and walks head down, to the dugout, and sits down, no waving his cap to the crowd, and afterward he autographs a hundred caps to hospitalized children and goes home, and mows his lawn.

My favorite Minnesota hero is Stan Nelson, who made me do chin-ups in physical education class at Anoka High School in 1957. I couldn't do them, but he made me try. I didn't know until Stan's 100th birthday celebration that Stan had piloted an LCI 492 landing craft at Normandy Beach on D-Day, making four separate landings, dropping four bands of troops. He had been in danger but he knew the men he ferried were in greater danger and many would die so he wore his honors privately."

(This is the part I am really going to try and remember- word for word). "And instead of major awards, I have these old friends. Some luck lies not in getting what you want but getting what you have, which- once you take a good look -you may realize is what you would've wanted if you had only known. I'm not sure that sentence is grammatically correct but it's true."