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.

Hope Springs Eternal

On a gentler, more hopeful note on this the first full day of Spring how about some Kurt Vonnegut. Herewith about the loveliest 'vision' in all of literature, belonging to protagonist Billy Pilgrim in the fourth chapter of Slaughterhouse Five:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve.

Happy spring Kurt. I hope they love you as much in Heaven as we loved you here on earth.