Backward and Forward

It’s said the threshold to summer is the Fourth no matter if the calendar says otherwise. Yes, the summer solstice has occurred, the planet’s tilted, and already the number of daylight hours is diminishing bit by bit. Still, it’s the Fourth of July, folks claim, when summer feels like it’s at last arrived. When (this morning’s fog notwithstanding) the weather gets reliably warmer, maybe even enough to start our griping about it. When the coastal roadways clog with what seems like newly-minted traffic. When all manners of outdoor cooking contrivances are hauled out, fired up. When, here and there, the pop of firecrackers peppers the night. Out come the bands trumpeting Sousa. Up goes the bunting and the flags. And though this may be the one holiday the greeting card companies can’t cash in on, their paper-plate-and-napkin-making compatriots, clever with the red-white-and-blue, rake it in.

Whether they’re big or small, Independence Day is the holiday of rituals – those of a nation, a town, a neighborhood, an island. Many include picnics and cook-outs, most with some form of potato salad or coleslaw, hot dogs and charred meat. Here, it’s our parade of the finest kind home-grown variety that pulls the island together for a few morning hours – or as one friend describes, “Half the island’s in it, the other half watches.” Over decades, rain or shine,the island parade predictably marches forth from Mill Pond, winds through the village, snakes down Route 15 to the old school where in the parking lot and with some careful maneuvering turns around and does it all over again. There is nothing about this unpretentious gathering of the young and old to match the grandeur of the Declaration of Independence’s prose but just about everything in it is a small representation of the optimism and unparalleled faith behind those words.

Actually, the Fourth, I believe, isn’t so much a starting point as a mid-point, a sort of fulcrum from which we can look backward and forward. To look back at, say, the summer weeks that have already slipped past us and ahead to those yet to come. Although, more important, in this time of historic deep recession and economic uncertainty, of political paralysis and potentially sweeping change, in a time of upheaval and shifting priorities, we may most need to be reminded of what Emerson said of us in 1844, of a country already, even then, with a rich past, “It is the country of the Future.”

And isn’t that part of the purpose of the Fourth? That within our many celebrations of it, to be reminded of how much change and transformation our country has experienced and survived? And so will survive? In living our holiday rituals, don’t we seek to have our confidence restored, each of us carrying within us our nation’s flawed history and our own? On the Fourth, long before the day winds down, and, if the fog doesn’t close in, before rockets rise and burst above the harbor, the real reason behind this holiday’s celebration, a country’s creation, will likely be forgotten. Soon enough, we’ll look ahead to the immediate future, to the day-after’s return to routine. With our spirits for a time revived, as the bunting on the porches already begins to sag, the realization will come that patriotic zeal or our looking back to when times may have been better will only get us so far. So how lucky then, for those of us who live in a community among neighbors, friends and family who are not always of like minds but who at the very least can come together in free assembly to celebrate, who, though independent are mutually reliant, and who, long after the fireworks have popped, flared, sizzled into the water and disappeared, after the parade’s flatbeds are put away for another year, will help carry us forward into summer, into another year, into the uncertainty of the future bolstered by our rich shared past.