Independence Day

 

Once upon a time there was a storyline, an agreed-upon narrative.  We may have had different ideas about America, but I think we made some basic assumptions.  Of course, that’s hindsight.  Looking back, with a more jaundiced eye, we see it colored by class, and race, and money.

I spent part of every summer at my grandmother’s place on Salters Point, in South Dartmouth, below Cape Cod.  On the 4^th of July, old Major Codman blew on a conch shell, and all the kids lined up in costume, for the Horribles Parade.  I quite honestly hadn’t thought of that in many, many years – it just popped into my head, unbidden.  I remember my sister, one year, with an old 78 tied on her head, and a smooth beach stone taped to it, probably six or seven years old, going to the parade as Rock’n’Roll. 

Some years later, driving down from Canada, I crossed into the U.S. and found myself along coastal Maine, another place I’d spend summers, with each of the small seaside towns having at least hung bunting up, for the 4^th, but more usually decorating the volunteer fire department’s pump truck, for a one-vehicle parade.  I got as far as Hancock, where there’s a small village square on Route 1, actually a triangle, where the old Bangor & Aroostook crosses the highway, and in that grassy triangle is a modest obelisk, inscribed with the names of Hancock boys who went to war in 1941.  My uncle Charlie’s name is on there, and his close pal Hugh Joy; they came back, after the war, and started a garage and repair shop together.  The names of the men from Hancock who didn’t come back are marked with a small star.

I lived in Provincetown, out at the end of Cape Cod, for almost fifteen years.  They had a pretty sizable parade for a town of three thousand people.  (That’s the number, year ‘round - in the summer season, July and August, it seems like ten thousand people.)  Anyway, the fire trucks and the EMT’s and the cops, and school floats, and the VFW, and a marching band, and drag queens and local businesses and just people playing dress-up.  It’s colorful, and fun, and expressive.  I like to think it celebrates an America we’re all a part of. 

Going back, again, to when I was growing up, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, of my childhood was perhaps a parochial place, the college presence well-established, but not so you really noticed.  I didn’t.  Harvard Square, for me, was about the Brigham’s ice cream and the Woolworth’s Five and Dime.  Woolworth’s had a lunch counter, and notions – thread and buttons and needles, potholders and aprons – and in the back they sold goldfish and guppies, and you could carry one home in a plastic bag (very carefully), to put in the aquarium. 

I clearly remember the narrative changing.  Down in Greensboro, North Carolina, four young black college students sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, and when they ordered donuts and coffee, were refused service.  This turned into a nationwide boycott, and in Cambridge, we stopped getting hot dogs at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. 

Four Young Men in Greensboro

Salters, and Hancock Point, and Provincetown, these places conjure up what we imagine to be small-town virtues, and even the Cambridge that I grew up in seemed pretty small to me.  I don’t think that means unsophisticated, but in our minds, at least, it probably stands in for less complicated or adversarial.  The world is confusing, and threatening.  We can take refuge in easy answers, or simple storylines, a sanitized, imaginary past. 

I want to think we’ve outgrown that, that generic refuge.  I want to believe we can tell ourselves more complicated or ambiguous stories.  America is large, it holds multitudes.