The 4th of July is precisely thirty days before my birthday.
I don’t think that I ever realized that until this exact moment.
Not-so-secret secret here: I can be a bit of a control freak in my own way. It doesn’t manifest in the stereotypical ways… I don’t try to micromanage the people I work with or freak out if there’s snow instead of sun. I know that an honest sense of productive happiness depends on one’s attitude, so I have come up with dozens of strategies to manage my attitude, and I enforce them upon myself with robotic rigor. The use of different colors at different times of year, or the distribution of meditative walks, or the codified shorthand of my to-do lists… these are just a few of these strategies. Sometimes they actually do work. Occasionally they are more burdensome than they are worth. Symbology, personal and cultural, is key… so you can imagine that as I’m approaching my fortieth birthday this year, I’m itching to find some meaning in the event.
I’m hoping to write a series of blog posts – extemporaneous, unscripted, mostly unedited – to reflect on turning 40. I’m doing it mostly for myself, but I’ll post them here in case they are of interest to others. Maybe I’ll finish them, or maybe not. There’s a lot going on.
And this is the first.
So as I said, the 4th of July is precisely thirty days before my birthday.
When you enjoy summerlong vacations from school growing up, the tendency to think of summer as being both timeless and transient is embedded on a cellular level. Just a couple weeks into June the sense of progression from one day to the next breaks down. You understand, in your mind, that these are calendar dates just as you might observe in November or February, but it doesn’t feel like it. Instead, each day is a quintessential expression of unchanging summerness and this feeling of freedom and potential and (to paraphrase Yoko Ono) exuberance is the heart of why school-age kids love summer so much. It feels like crossing the Pacific Ocean, also to which there is a beginning and an end, both of which are lost in the vastness of the space in between.
If this is the case, then the 4th of July, both to children and to adults, is one of the first and largest atolls in this summery ocean. Far enough from either shore that we have scant memory of spring cleaning or the apprehension of winters’ creep, this capital letter Event rises from the waves with its own potent symbology: fireworks, hot dogs and potato salad, big brass bands and summery concerts on the grass. Overwhelming heat… the dog days started yesterday and will persist well into August. And since the 4th of July is one of the Big Holidays – big enough that stores close and families travel and holiday-themed memories bubble up through our consciousness – there is the possibility of collapsing time in a different way. Of making one 4th of July coterminus with all of the 4ths of July, past and future.
I have to admit, I have never felt so ambivalent about the 4th of July as I do in 2018. Balancing the one hand, the fact that I got my historically circumspect liberal arts education at American schools against the critiques therein of the American experiment, we can’t lose sight of the fact that those critiques are valid and they certainly feel potent enough today. We still get to choose where we land in our reflections.
So, for example, what was more important? That George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have noble ideas that they failed to live up to in their own lives (being, as people so often like to say, products of their time), or that they were hypocrites trying to build a political order that would reward men like them? Both statements are true, but someone who has done well in America, it is much easier for me to gravitate toward the first as being the one that gets the point. The people that they owned would disagree, however. The fact that we are again making the same spirit of mistakes – not vices, but sins, in the words of Treme‘s Terry Colson – as we were making over 200 years ago – lends credence to the second sentiment.
Regardless, I feel ambivalent about the 4th of July in 2018 and since Big Holidays like Independence Day are able to collapse times and memories into one another, there is both cross-pollination and contamination between the past and the present.
My earliest memories of the 4th are at my Grandma Coyne’s. I can’t remember the year, but they involve a lot of pale adult calves and knees at eye level. People sit at picnic tables under a black walnut tree, with hot dogs and burgers cooking on a brick cube grill someone built in my grandma’s backyard. The features of the backyard have a kind of permanence to them, since I’ve seen them often and they’ve been around as long as I have. Besides the grill, these include a wooden porch swing surrounded by twirls of ivy and flowers, a concrete cast of the seal of the State of Michigan, as big as I am, that my grandfather (?) had salvaged from a demolished bank years before and which is now prominently displayed in a flower bed, and the black walnut tree that hangs over us with its supple knife-shaped leaves, pale green, as heavy now as they’ll ever be. My sister is there and running around, so I’m at least four, and we run shrieking through the sprinkler while the adults talk and eat potato salad. Our sprinkler at home just sways back-and-forth but this one whips in circles, sending two jets of spray out onto the lawn as it twirls, so it is new and exciting to run through. Eventually, the sun will go down and the flood light will blink on over the garage, bathing everything in a ghostly white, and the grown-ups will stand on the black asphalt driveway, talking before they head out for the night. In my earliest memories, the 4th of July is all about staying up late and running around in gentle heat, surrounded by people who protect me.
My earliest memory of fireworks on the 4th are probably from a couple years later. I remember watching them from a grassy slope in downtown Flint that has been cleared for the AutoWorld theme park, but AutoWorld hadn’t been built yet, so it was probably 1983. Which coincides nicely with the memory above, so maybe AutoWorld has been built and I just haven’t noticed. Memories are slippery. At any rate, I remember that my parents have spread a blanket on the grass to watch the fireworks and that there are lot of other people – hundreds or thousands – there with us, and it is noisy and dim. We may or may not have visited with our friend Dave and his daughter Carly, who is six years older than me and gives me great huge pushes on the swing set in our backyard. We sit on the plaid blanket there, under the shade of the small maple that grew beside our neighbor’s garage, and eat toasted French bread topped with ham and melted cheddar cheese. I may or may not have spent the night with Dave and Carly in their downtown garden apartment, in a grand old building with bright red pipes that carry the water and steam from one apartment to the next. It seems likely that these are several distinct memories I’ve gathered under the umbrella of one Independence Day, but they’ve lived there for long-enough that they tell me something new about the 4th of July: that it is a day about community and connection between families and neighbors. That we don’t go through this world alone, and that our company warrants celebration.
As I get older, the feelings of the 4th of July shift. The family fragments, people start and stop school, and some traditions are disrupted even while the symbology stabilizes. Fireworks and watermelon aren’t unprecedented events anymore… they are things we come to associate specifically with the 4th.
But still several moments of the 4th stand out over the years. One year, we go to see the fireworks in Bay City, and the Saginaw River is huge – much huger than the little Flint river – so the reflection of the explosions in the water, the dots on boats underneath, and the families lining the steel bars that run the waterfront all stand out.
I remember the fireworks when I am eleven (thirty days from twelve!) and my family has just moved to Flushing, where the fireworks launch at a distance, in a large field, before farmland, with fireflies blinking on and off beneath the din, whereas I had always seen them in cities before. The sense that this is a whole different thing, this new home of mine.
And, then again, nine years later, and back in Flint, the most dramatic fireworks of them all.
AutoWorld has opened and closed and been demolished and the grounds are once again the site of the fireworks, but the event planners have miscalculated how close it is safe to allow the crowds, and my friends and I have made it to the very front. By several minutes into the spectacular display, bankrolled by General Motors, our ears feel ready to pop in our heads and scraps of fiery paper rain down on us from above. We love it. We wish we could do this every time. It is the fertile, fecund summer before I turn 21 and was directing avant-garde theater with high-schoolers while home from college in Chicago. We actively seek out rules to break, and so this year the 4th of July is a challenge: a “can you make your voices as loud as these primary colors and these pretty bombs?”
I share the same sentiment today, but without the benefit of youthful rage. It’s harder to stay up all night, is what I mean.
And, then again, five years later, back in Chicago, out of college, without a stable job, my girlfriend and I go to see the fireworks from Adler Planetarium, and while it is a nightmare getting out on the pier through the crowds, our efforts reward us with a spectacular view. The Chicago Harbor is studded with hundreds of ships. Grant Park holds more than a million spectators (I keep thinking of them in terms of Seurat at the Art Institute). And then, behind that, those dozens upon dozens of gleaming towers, hundreds of feet high, concrete and steel and bright light in the long sunmer twilight. That 4th of July is about how Big America is… 300 million strong! And about the stake I am putting in it by starting my own family here: just one month ago, I asked my girlfriend to marry me and she said “yes.”
And, then again, seven years later, in Zanesille, Ohio, my wife’s hometown, where we leave our one-year old daughter with her dad and go up and down the dark backstreets of that hilly town and arrive at a grassy field that overlooks its converging rivers and see the fireworks from a distance. Below their fiery glories, we see the county courthouse with twirly decorative stonework older that anything in my hometown of Flint and older than most of Chicago. Zaneville is a small town tucked into a few square miles bordered by the foothills of the Appalachians, and with all of these treed slopes around, you can’t see any signs of the city until you’re right upon it. But the National Road winds through Zanesville, and the tiny steel-making city enjoyed a brief turn as the capital of the young state of Ohio. So this 4th is about calling upon my past, my lived experiences, and channeling them into the skills I will need to be a good father. I know that for the next twenty-odd years I’ll be doing the most important job of my life, possibly the most difficult, and certainly the most ambiguous. This 4th is about responsibility.
And, then again, seven years later, back in Flint (again)… but wait, this isn’t the 4th of July. It’s the 30th of June. And I’m not downtown at night to see fireworks, but I’m there during the blazing-hot day with my daughter and my best friends and their son. We’re here to protest the president’s Zero Tolerance policy by which children are separated from parents. The parents are seeking asylum from wars and gangs in Central America. Part of the reason those gangs and wars are in power is because of covert American interventions during the Cold War that kicked off genocides, civil war, and violent underground economies. Guatemala knows American power. So does El Salvador. So does Nicaragua. We will argue that the administration’s actions are Un-American, and what we mean when we say this goes back to the problem of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson: we need to live up to their ideals without embracing their hypocrisy. As a nation, we are living the hypocrisy right now. But the hundreds of protesters on Saginaw Street that day come out into the heat to stand for the ideal of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as well as, given the number of Christian denominations present, Matthew 25:36.
Now I’ll let you in on a secret here: I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with the national anthem for the last several years. I have, for the most part, been a part of the patriotic crowd when I’ve been at, say, a concert or a ballgame. I honor those who have chosen to make symbolic complaints by kneeling during the singing of the anthem, while I, myself have opted to stand. Maybe I haven’t been brave enough to kneel, or maybe I have felt a conversational approach is the most productive in my own communities. But it has been hard for me to sing the national anthem when I have seen it wielded as a cudgel, to discredit those opposing injustice and hypocrisy in our land. And I have felt that those who sing it with hard hearts toward their fellow humans are doing a far greater insult against the anthem and the flag and the preamble than those who demand we live up to its ideals. And, increasingly, I have not sung or even mouthed the words.
But we open that protest with the anthem and, to me, at least, it feels like a gift. Like I have been given back something that I had lost and hadn’t even realized that I missed. I feel like that crowd, assembled in 90 degree heat to stand up for a more just vision of the country in which we live, has sung those words with understanding and compassion, and thereby gives me back all of the memories I’ve just written about at such length. After all, the 4th of July belongs to me, too, and since it is a Big Holiday, and since Big Holidays collapse time, I have the right and the responsibility to use all of the tools that the 4th of July has given me to become a better father, a better husband, a better son, a better brother, a better friend, a better neighbor, a better citizen, a better human.
I am going to turn forty in thirty days.
Tonight, I am going to see the fireworks here in Flint, and I am going to sing the national anthem.
I am also going to fight and speak and argue and live to make my nation as just and fair and true as is possible in this all-too-flawed and transient world.
I don’t know what the 4th of July will mean to me in the years and decades to come, but I know that I will carry forward the events of today and will be able to apply their lessons for the rest of my life.
Time really isn’t as hard and inflexible as it seems to our human bodies and minds.
When we remember, we are time travelers.
Make the most of your remembering.