(Happy 29th Anniversary to Jeff & Donna, my brother and sister-in-law.)

At first I resisted writing about July 4th.  I figured everyone else would.

I rationalized that there was nothing to celebrate.  I thought about a class taught by William Appleman Williams while I was at Madison.  He lectured about the American Revolution, but used data to show it really wasn’t a simple popular uprising, but rather one initiated by those who wanted expansionist capital to be housed in the New World and not just in London where it was locked and loaded.  Hardly a grassroots revolution.

Then came the usual “I want to be different” bullshit, which seems lodged in my DNA, never to completely disappear.

So I’m writing about the 4th.  What the hell, despite my democratic socialist views and cynical eye, I still believe there’s “…a lot to like in America…”

I know the politically correct thing is to begin with regret about the lost and maimed soldiers who have fought in all our wars–but it wasn’t the first thing that popped to mind.

I just never before thought about war on the 4th–I thought fireworks.  (Yeah, I know, pretty fucking stupid not to have made the connection between fireworks and bombs, but give me a break.)

The 4th ended with fireworks in my hometown park (Carteret, exit 12 off the N.J. Turnpike), but better yet was the earlier parade where I could see Spot, the Dalmatian my family once owned in his new digs.  He was riding the fire truck since we had given him to the local department when he grew too large for the house.  Bittersweet, but cool.  (Probably more associations to be made with that last sentence fragment too-but not today.)

All in all, it was a great day because I always pretended my birthday was July 4th (even though it was the 6th) so that all the parades and parties were for me
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Then the next fireworks blast (sorry) hit me on Miami Beach when my youngest son was still an infant.  The day featured The Jefferson Starship with Grace Slick belting out songs all afternoon.  Come evening, we met up with the family of my older son’s friend and walked the beach.  Fireworks were cascading from the top of the Art Deco hotels toward the ocean, met in the middle by more fireworks aimed toward the beach from a flotilla of boats along the shoreline.

The experience felt like walking under the overhead canopy of flashing neon in downtown Las Vegas or the scene inApocalypse Now where the river boat meets up with soldiers protecting a bridge under rocket and mortar fire. (Another connection between Independence Day and war.  Hmmmm.)

But the funniest and most frustrating firework memory happened right here in Boston during my father’s first visit.  It was the Bicentennial and the city had been bragging for weeks about the magic that would light the sky after the traditional Boston Pops concert on the Esplanade next to the Charles River.  I had a close friend who lived in an apartment with a perfectly located roof for viewing.  As everyone at the party, including my father, climbed the stairs to the sound of THE 1812 OVERTURE (always played to introduce the fireworks), we walked into a cloudless night.

With a breeze.  A fucking windy breeze.  That July 4th may have been the greatest show on earth, but all we saw was smoke.  And more smoke.  ‘Coulda been a factory stack belching nonstop black and grey.  At least some smokestacks have fire burning off their tops and it would have been more light than we saw that entire night.

Welcome to Bicentennial Boston, Pop.

My final 4th story has nothing to do with fireworks or even Independence Day, per se.  I was working as a teacher’s aide in a Chicago high school right before I moved to Boston.  I had long since mailed my draft card back to the local board but it was the day they instituted the lottery for the Vietnam War draft and the numbers were published in the newspaper.  Each number corresponded with a birthdate.  I grabbed the paper, skimmed the dates, and saw my hideously low number thirteen.  My gut tightened ’cause I knew my shit was gonna hit the fan one way or another.  It was a really long anxiety ridden afternoon until something inside whacked me upside the head.  I had looked at July 4-that childhood idea had stuck around painfully long.  I scrambled back to the garbage where I’d stuffed the newspaper and found July 6.  My real number was in the three hundreds.

Although I now sometimes forget how old I am, I haven’t made that mistake again.

“I guess if the 4th looks like a war, sounds like a war, it is indeed connected to a war.”
Zachary Klein