Glorious Fourths

An ode to patriotism

By: Christine Kreyling

Published On: June 25, 2010

Independence Day isn’t one of my favorite holidays. By this point in the long, hot summer that is Nashville’s, I’m invariably nursing a sizable collection of mosquito and chigger welts and avoiding occasions in which I might attract more. So the All-American cookout and picnic are pretty much off limits.

I make an exception if my salute to the Declaration of the Founding Fathers includes submerging my itchy body parts in someone’s pool. I make another for East Nashville’s Hot Chicken Festival, out of local patriotism and because the combination of fiery food and cold beer tends to allay the urge to scratch. But when the festival winds down I retreat, in reverse-vampire mode, to my casket of air conditioning.

I don’t head down to the riverfront as dusk falls to watch the fireworks, picturesque as the display may be. That’s because before I did so I’d have to slather a quart of bug repellent over every inch of exposed flesh. Being the walking Superfund site in a crowd of burger-scented revelers erodes the communal spirit. Besides, I’d still hear—or imagine I heard, which is just as bad—the little critters whining in my ears. Paranoia strikes deep in the thin of skin.

Or maybe I’m just old-of-heart. For I recall that, when I was a kid, July 4th used to be a high point of summer vacation, second only to our two weeks in Michigan. Perhaps I remember childhood Fourths as glorious because they were the holiday my father gloried in. For on this day of the year he’d shuffle off the responsibilities of spouse-and-fatherhood and regress to the youthful state incited by large quantities of incendiary devices—a one-day pyromaniac.

Dad left the noisy stuff to my brother and his fellow warriors, whose firecrackers rat-tat-tatted through the neighborhood for “Independence Week.” When the guys tossed an M-80 or cherry bomb into a metal garbage can, the deafening detonation made suburbia sound like Kandahar.

What my father loved were the lights that came out after dark in our backyard, the domesticated spectacles in which he and Joe, his best friend and my godfather, served as masters of ceremonies. The two always pretended they took charge as a protective act: “Let me light that, hon; I don’t want you to burn your hand.” But their shared excitement—lubricated by some toddies for the bodies—made it clear to even the pre-Ks that our fathers were temporarily just the largest kids among us. It was the mothers who remained sensible adults, sitting in lawn chairs, nervously puffing cigarettes, waiting for the barrage to pass.

We started with sparklers, scrolling circles and loops as we ran across the grass. Then Dad and Joe got down to the serious stuff, the flower pots and roman candles that arced red and green, silver and gold into the sky—and sometimes onto neighboring roofs, setting off a collective frisson among the ladies. With each burst of color, the assembled exhaled an admiring “Oooh.”

The grand finale was the giant pinwheel tacked to the telephone pole at the edge of the perennial border. My mother always braced herself for this part. “My poor peonies,” she’d murmur, fearing embers falling onto her “Buckeye Belles.”

As the red-white-and-blue glints spun into the night air, we clapped and breathed a final “Aaah.” The Fourth was history, and the peonies had survived to bloom another year.