by Hardscrabble Farmer | Posted Jul 5, 2015
“Life without Liberty is Like a body without spirit”
—Kahlil Gibran
Independence Day has long been my favorite holiday. My earliest memories center around the picnic-like atmosphere of these annual celebrations, from the deviled eggs and grilled meat to the fireworks displays in the warm Summer darkness. Each year was a nationwide birthday party for the Republic and a means of reminding us of the events that led to our happy lives wherever we lived. I have no doubt that there were those who resented or cared nothing for it, but to me it was the ultimate form of both unity and individualism, even when I barely understood the concepts. My children have always asked about my childhood as they track the progress of their own and I would regale them with the assorted stories that revolved around this particular day; when Yanna Nikitas threw a cherry Slurpee on my prized yellow Chicago T-shirt and I responded by punching her in her 10 year old face only to be dragged away from the party by my father where I was made to sit in our Buick Skylark until the fireworks were over, soaked in perspiration and miserable. Afterwards as we drove home in silence we passed a lumber yard that had taken a direct hit from an errant firework and watched as the firemen poured streams of water into the conflagration, my parents faces glowing orange in the darkness and my father reached his hand back to stroke my head, all forgiven. There was the annual rite of my father clipping the reprint of the Declaration of Independence from the New York Times and pinning it to the apple tree in the back yard with a leather handled Estwing hatchet where it fluttered all day in the gentle breeze. In the Summer of 1976 we watched the tall ships sail up the Hudson kRiver and the fantastic, seemingly endless display of fireworks that signaled the Bicentennial and three years later, only days before I was to report for my enlistment in the US Army my closest friends and I hiked up to the top of High Point where we watched fifty local displays of fireworks a thousand feet below us spanning a 360 view of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania as if we were gods on Olympus. I can’t recall a single 4th of July that wasn’t filled with food, friendship, family and an abiding feeling of what it meant to be free. On the last year we lived in New Jersey, where fireworks were strictly prohibited by the Nanny State, my oldest son and I drove across the Delaware and picked up several hundred dollars worth of rockets and mortars, flares and roman candles and then under the cover of darkness we packed them into my old rucksack and walked a circuitous route along the hedgerows firing them from a dozen hidden locations to the applause and whistles of the people in town.
No comments:
Post a Comment