A Holiday With a Distinct Double Edge

This week, as is our tradition, I reminded my husband how much better the Fourth was where I grew up. How much more it had to do with patriotism back East. How much less with man’s inalienable right to grill.

Back East, there was a flag on every front porch, and a hometown parade so lovely it would break your heart. As is also our tradition, I left out the part where the drunks from the hometown Elks Club went reeling down the parade route on the hometown firetruck.

My husband countered with his own fond memories from here in the suburbs of Greater Los Angeles. Every Fourth, his grandpa would arrive in his Cadillac Fleetwood, the trunk full of fireworks.

Come dusk, the sky would blaze and shriek and reek of sulfur as the man with the big car and the little mustache shot rockets over the silhouetted palms. My husband didn’t discuss what this spectacle must have done to his mother, who had to have been white-knuckled, waiting for his little hand to get blown off.

“The Fourth of July isn’t what it used to be,” people say, and there’s the temptation here to think, “Oh, yes it is.” You hear a lot of ain’t-what-it-used-to-be from Southern Californians. They rearrange everything they can get their hands on, then cry because everything’s changed.

Still, holidays can set you up. You get nostalgic, and then the downsides rush in. Love the picnics, hate the drunks. Love the holiday sales, hate the crowds. Love the fireworks, hate the fire hazard. Love the neighborliness, hate that gun nut next door, pulling off festive rounds at the moon.

*

The thing was, we had a minute this year to actually think about the Fourth. It made us wonder whether we shouldn’t be more, I don’t know, patriotic this time. Take the kids to a landmark maybe. Or just buy a flag. But the more we mulled it over, the tired-er we got.

It’s not easy to be a patriot. (Your civics teacher was right.) You start thinking about flags, and pretty soon you’re thinking about government. Government leads to politics and, before you know it, you’re depressed. Crazy politicians, crazy laws, crazy lonely guys with bombs--for these things we’re taking the day off?

It’s such a contradiction, being an American. We’re such nice people, and yet we can do such dreadful things. Welfare, immigration--our laws swing from the open-spirited to the mean-spirited and back. There are times when you can’t tell the engine of democracy from a firetruck full of civic drunks.

The Fourth of July takes on the feel of a big, coast-to-coast family reunion in which, for one day, no one’s fat or feuding or out on parole. For one day, we pretend to be citizens of a more perfect union. We are “We, the People,” as opposed to we, the human beings.

How to reconcile our contradictions? How to accept our downsides? How to honor this nation, so hard to leave, so hard, sometimes, to love? So many questions, so few unqualified answers. So little red-white-and-blue certainty, so much gray.

A person, a city, a nation gets to a certain point, and all of life becomes double-edged, it seems. Ambivalence becomes part of your flawed, familiar landscape, like an errant gray hair.

*

There’s probably a lot you could say about the Fourth of July. You could shout, “My country, right or wrong.” Or even, “My country, more or less.”

But self-evident truths are hard to come by. Also, seeing as how this is a national holiday, there is serious grilling to be done. And we do have some traditions. At dusk, for example, we’ll drive to a hill overlooking the country club, and, in honor of democracy, crash their pyrotechnics show.

It’ll be almost nostalgic, the way the kids will hop and fidget, the way the toddler will announce, “Have to go potty now.” But then a blossom of red and silver will explode on the night sky, and we’ll tilt up our faces and gasp in delight.

At the end, there will be a boom, and then--my favorite part--a stillness. My head will remind me that all emotions are mixed.

And yet, it will be so lovely, it’ll break my double-edged heart, the trees, the stars, the clouds that linger after the fireworks.