TUT'S TOMB IN MY BASEMENT

Have you ever excavated an Egyptian tomb? Well, neither have I. Until last month. A cousin found an old photo album of our extended family which we had never before seen. Let alone experienced. The experience was stunning...!

There -- in a wide-frame, long-shot -- were 24 members of my maternal ancestors looking up from their long summertime picnic table. Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, aunts, uncles. Now long dead, but here magnificently rediscovered in all their youthful vigor. It is their DNA, their dreams, their wounds that have helped make me me. You know the feeling too.

I was a pink, two-year-old cuddled in my Mother's apron. And yet, seeing oneself that young and that innocent does not so much make you think of the untombed past, but of the unfolding future. Their genes and my genes and my children's children's genes flowing on into what I expect to be an eternal community.

That frozen summer moment was more than three generations ago -- a very different, simpler America. Today Nancy Gibbs reports: "Half of us live in suburbs, the center of the population has shifted 324 miles west and 101 miles south to Phelps County Missouri, America used to be majority male but by 2000 only seven states had more men than women, the average household [in that photo] contained five people which has now dropped to three."

So where is my country -- my family's DNA -- moving toward today?

On June 27 1937, President Roosevelt accepted his party's nomination for a second term with these words which may answer that question for our generation: "The economic royalists complain we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain is we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and Constitution.

"In their blindness they forget what Flag and Constitution stand for. Now as always for democracy, not tyranny; freedom, not subjection; against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike....there is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny!"

Mom, Dad, my dear departed family -- I only hope we can realize that destiny as well as you did!