A State of Mind and Not a Day

The Fourth of July is never only the Fourth. It’s also a state of mind.When I was young, people dressed up for The Fourth. Back then you wouldn't dare reproduce Old Glory’s design in clothing  and so…. you improvised: You could don a pair of blue shorts; then your top could be white; then the red would come from your socks or shoes - sporty Keds if you had a pair -  or, if you felt bold enough and could take the teasing, a bright red scarf like the one the Lone Ranger wore.Anyway, that's how I remember July Fourth the summer I woke up inside my life.I say ‘woke up’: I mean when I first noticed I was living it, which  happened as I was walking my decorated if slightly fender-dented two-wheeler to the big Bike Parade being held on the Boys’ Side of the playground of the Oakland School.“I'm nine years old.” I remember thinking.  “It's almost summer. And I'm walking all alone on the sidewalk."That year, as with all the years of my childhood, July Fourth brought out talk at the family table about the  latest war.There was only that one war we kids heard about then and it was Big War, the ‘Good War’, the Second World War as they called it in our history books which seemed to me to gloss over the sad fact of the war just before it, the war that was meant to end all wars.Our grownups spoke of this last war only, the gasoline rations and the saving of tinfoil and so on.To us kids though it was just one other thing that had happened to THEM, those inscrutable adults, those foreign beings. It was a thing as far removed from our modern lives as the gramophone.And yet.And yet.Somehow we could still feel its enormity, mostly from the things we came upon: That trunk in the cellar filled with Army Green trousers and tunics stiff now with age.That picture of the day it all ended and there was our mom, young, along with half the town riding on top of their cars and laughing  and throwing their hats in the air.But then there were those other pictures that my sister and I found in the wooden chest buried under our uncle’s tool bench. He had presided over a military court in Sardinia as we later learned, and the pictures were of dead civilians stuffed into narrow raw wood coffins in their blood-splattered clothes, all staring sightlessly upward. His job had been to bring their civilian killers to justice.“What was this war?” we asked each other.  “What happened in it?“Something big, we knew that much. And maybe we even sensed that this ‘something’ was what purchased the safe and happy years we were currently enjoying, I'm not sure.It’s the Fourth now, the day some call the nation’s one true Holy Day.  We should pause at least for a few moments during it and ponder the many sacrifices it commemorates.

Sad

I was so sad yesterday. In the supermarket, on the road, my eyes kept filling with tears and why? Because I hurt my ankle at dawn in the darkened driveway trying to get Uncle Ed’s wheelchair into my car? Because when I went to get him for his bloodwork he said he felt ‘bereft’ during the whole six days I was gone, causing me to feel I let him down? Because that's what we all do, let down the people we love who love us back even with our annoying habit of leaving the cabinet doors open as we cook?Maybe I’m sad because HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” ended last night and I just loved it, the way they got so much right about the year 1920. I once taught a course on the Twenties in America, so I know something about the era. The main thing I know is what that First World War did to people, which you see so clearly in the character of Jimmy Darmody: he has quite simply lost his humanity. (His hideously disfigured friend and fellow-vet Richard Harrow has the same problem only his wounds show.)How can people recover from such an experience? I heard a segment on This American Life about a child who had been in a Romanian orphanage until he was seven, literally tied in a crib with no stimulation, no human engagement... The couple who adopted him were at wit’s end by the time he was in adolescence; he was that violent. Then this adoptive mother underwent a special kind of therapy to bond her with her son the same way an infant bonds with its mother: by having the two gaze fixedly into one another’s eyes for hours at a time. It is an amazing and hopeful story.Maybe I was just sad because of my own mother's death and I shouldn’t really look on that loss as I did here yesterday. Maybe if I lie on my back now she and all my dear ones will come, the way Billy Collins says they do in this 30-second clip, pausing above us to watch til we sleep:[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3474890035450021520#]

THE DEAD by Billy Collins

The dead are always looking down on us, they say.while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heavenas they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,they think we are looking back at them,which makes them lift their oars and fall silentand wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.