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 4th 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 4th, 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.
