THIS MONTH I'm traveling to eastern Kentucky to attend a conference on community sustainability, an important challenge for small communities snuggled into state's narrow valleys and along its rugged mountainsides. In these places, like so many other communities across nation, children are regularly educated to believe that rich, full, and successful lives can be lived only if they leave their communities and their cultures far behind. Going to eastern Kentucky is always a pleasure for It is home and a place I do not visit often enough. When I do, my mind is always flooded with childhood memories. As I prepared for this trip and what I would say in my little speech, my mind returned to hundreds of trips my family made from Dayton, Ohio, where my parents moved when mechanization replaced my father's pick and shovel in eastern Kentucky's coal mining industry. We lived in Ohio, but it was never home. Home was narrow sliver of bottom land running alongside Caney Creek in Knott County, where first Owens family member settled just after Revolutionary War and where generations of Owenses after him eked out a living on rocky hillsides that rise sharply on both sides of creek. Going home was for many years central focus of our family life. As soon as my father got off work on Friday night, our family would pile into our ancient Buick and head south along Route 25, or what was then called Hillbilly Highway. The traffic was always backed up from Cleveland to Cincinnati, jammed with other families like ours anxious to escape lives in often hostile cities and find peace among our extended families. From time to time, old Buick actually made trip without breaking down. On those occasions, it was about a 12-hour drive. And that was with no video players, no hand-held games, and no iPods to keep a car full of kids amused. But that didn't matter, because my mother loved to sing. With glow of passing headlights casting shadows that seemed to reveal monsters spying on us at every turn, my father drove dark and narrow roads that would lead us to my aunt's front porch somewhere near break of dawn. And as he drove, my brothers and sisters and I drifted in and out of a fuzzy sleep, and my mother serenaded us with what my younger brother and I later came to call the concert of death, doom, and sorrow. Carrying a tune was not among my mother's talents. But that wasn't important. To her, it was all about lyrics. Her songs recounted horrific traffic and mining accidents, tragic deaths of loved ones, and sorrowful laments of wrongfully incarcerated, peppered with stories of bravery and patriotism, sacrifice and sin, tragedy and heartbreak. Among her favorites were World War II songs. She particularly loved one about Johnny, a young man with a rather weak educational history whom kids always taunted on test day by singing, got a zero, he got another zero. As story unfolds, we learn that Johnny is now a fighter pilot particularly adept at shooting down Japanese planes called Zeroes. Thus refrain that my mother sang, seeming always to fight back tears: got a Zero, he got another Zero. She was always a sap for such irony. Another favorite recounted tale of a young mountain boy begging an Army recruiter to let him join up. Though I realize I'm crippled, that is true sir, he explains. Please don't judge my courage by my twisted knee. My mother always got particularly riled up when she sang refrain, God gave me right to be a free American, and for that precious right I would gladly die. There's a Star Spangled Banner waving somewhere. In that heaven there must be a place for me. Her emotion may have grown out of death of her younger brother Robert--for whom I was named--who was killed on beaches of Normandy. But to me it was always about doing right and sacrificing for greater good. …