IIn 2017, I traveled with my two teenage children to Plains, Georgia, from Jacksonville, Florida, to hear Jimmy Carter teach Sunday School at Maranatha Baptist Church.

My son Gibson requested this trip to celebrate his 17th birthday. A fierce and unusual admirer of the Carter presidency, he had recently written a high school history paper on the Jimmy Carter administration and the rise of arch-conservatism, and we were all shocked by Donald Trump’s inauguration speech that month.

The three of us spent a pastoral Saturday around Plains, visiting Carter’s childhood home and peanut farm, his brother Billy’s gas station and the train depot that became the 1975 presidential campaign headquarters. We stood as a Southern family in the Carter Visitor Center, housed in the high school where the future president and First Lady were students. We admired Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize and took photos sitting at a replica of his Oval Office desk. As we wandered from exhibition to exhibition, we could easily fall back on 1976.

I was ten years old in Jacksonville that year when the American Bicentennial permeated everything: television, magazines, clothing, commemorative coins this and that. Not only coins, spoons and the like, but our lady from Avon could sell us perfume in a bottle shaped like Betsy Ross sewing the flag, or soaps with the likeness of George and Martha Washington cast on them. I could rummage through the Cheerios box to get the first scribbles on the Stars and Stripes stickers, or send in a Bicentennial scratch-and-sniff coloring book with my Applejacks.

It felt like a patriotic celebration to which the entire country was invited. I was completely there. As my mother always said about me: you’re not happy unless every day is a parade, and for once it felt that way.

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And I was one terribly A serious kid, as evidenced by my own way of celebrating the bicentennial, which included learning military hymns, memorizing the Gettysburg Address, and staging a variety show on the carport attached to our home of concrete blocks adjacent. My best friend was Thomas Jefferson and I was Ben Franklin, our pant legs sticking awkwardly into our knee socks, trying to make it look like we were wearing jodhpurs. The most remarkable part of the whole thing wasn’t that the neighborhood kids actually showed up, but that no one fooled us, at least not to our faces.

What I was most proud of, however, were the four poems I wrote in honor of our country’s birthday, which won the Northeast Florida Girl Scouts Regional Talent Show at Camp Kateri. This was no small feat as my competitors included a girl playing ‘One Tin Soldier’ ​​on her flute and another girl performing a karate routine to the song ‘Kung Fu Fighting’.

But it wasn’t just the Bicentennial that overwhelmed me with patriotism.

A southern peanut farmer, from the same state as my father’s side of the family dating back to the 17th century, was running for president.

And his appeal went deeper than his familiar drawl. Despite being deeply religious, Jimmy Carter did not come across as judgmental. When he spoke, it was with steady calm and good-natured intelligence. I felt inexplicably proud, as if he and his family were our wealthy relations.

I lay in bed that year and imagined scenarios where our paths would cross, such as if the Carter campaign were coming to Jacksonville and we would be chosen as the average American family to spend an evening with. Since we both wore glasses and liked to read, I knew his daughter Amy and I hit it off, maybe over a game of Parcheesi, and before you knew it, I was flying to the White House for sleepovers.

I was disappointed that despite all my perceived similarities, my father still didn’t vote for him. But I did in the fifth-grade election—probably my first act of rebellion against my father. That said, I still remember Dad announcing that he was happy to finally see a Southern man on TV who wasn’t always portrayed as a loser.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when my understanding of what it meant to be patriotic came to mean something completely different.

I felt it in 1979, when conservative Christians organized into constituencies. I also felt it during the ‘Republican Revolution’ of ’94, when Newt Gingrich presented his Contract for America, and certainly in 2009, when the Tea Party rose up against Obama. By 2016, when Trump became president, it was as if the Republican Party had completely submerged itself in patriotism, along with a good deal of Christianity.

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By the time January 6th happened, I thought the idea of ​​patriotism could never mean what it used to. Instead of a sense of shared pride, it seethed with anger and coveted control.

But on that day in Plains in 2017, it was impossible not to be patriotic in the nostalgic sense, to not find “new faith in an old dream,” to quote President Carter himself.

The next day, as I sat in the pew with my children while Jimmy taught us Sunday school, and as we had our pictures taken with him and Rosalyn after church, it made the ten-year-old girl in me grin like it was 1976 again. As Plains faded into the rearview mirror, I wondered if it was still possible that someone like him could ever become president again.

It’s been about eight years since that pilgrimage. I’m thinking about it now because I hear echoes of the same goals Carter spoke of in the speeches Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have given in Minnesota, Arizona, and Nebraska: that “the test of government is not how popular it is with the powerful.” and the privileged few, but how fairly and honestly the many who depend on it are treated.” And of course also because Uncle Jimmy (as I respectfully and longingly call him) turns 100 on Tuesday and it is proof positive that the good guys can see the impact of their efforts spread around the world.

Even more than I did that day in the town of Plains, I have a new faith in that old dream that suddenly feels new again.