Happy 4th of July

 

Happy 4th of July

 reworked, revised, revisited...yes, you've read parts of this before

The sky is pure blue, "painted that way as G'ma said every time she looked up.  The occasional fluffy white cloud drifts by, and I'm hearing G'ma remark on that, too.  The flag in front of the house is swaying, the pole wedged between the base and the capital of one of the front columns, secured with thin, silver, crafting wire.  

It's an elegant solution to TBG's reluctance to put holes in his house;  I feel like Daddooooo every time I wrap another ring around the post.

Daddooooo was big on ingenious remedies to intractable problems.  He was also big on flags and the 4th of July.  We always went to the beach.  We always stopped at Custom Bakers on the way home, where the owners always let us go back and stick our fingers in the vats of frosting.

We always went to the Boardwalk in Long Beach, arriving as the sun was setting.  Skeeball and mechanical fortune tellers and the smell of the ocean, too black to be seen but too noisy to go unnoticed, occupied us as we waited for night to fall.  We practiced our ooohs and aahhhs; we were in fine form by the time the booms and the bangs began.

Through it all, the flags were flying.

There was a big one in the bracket beside the garage door, until the house was painted and further holes were frowned upon (is this some kind of male thing I just don't get?). A pole-holding-tube was sunk into the flower box, and while it was neither sturdy nor attractive, it did the job and as far as Daddooooo was concerned that was that.

There was a plastic flag attached to the car's antenna, and all our bicycles had flags on the handlebars.   

I'm not letting the tradition fade away. 

I have our flag jammed into the column supporting the courtyard's overhang,

 

as I do on all the flag flying holidays.  

I'm wearing my red white and blue tie dye - the dress, the tank top, the even bigger tank top - as I go through my day. 

I'll make red white and blue strawberry shortcake (strawberries and blueberries and whipped cream) to go with the All American BBQ featuring hot dogs and burgers and corn on the cob, and I'll miss inviting Fast Eddie and JannyLou over to share in the fixin's.

I'll spend some time with the Americana section of the bookshelves, 

searching for answers to how we got to this point, how we managed to let our institutions come to the brink of disaster.  There must be something in all that verbiage about all those white men that can enlighten me.  

Big Cuter, the history major, tells me that 1/3 of Americans have always been antithetical to the notion of The United States, and he gave me the historical references to prove it.  

Our former president turned over the rock under which they were hiding.  It's a heavy, disgusting, foul rock.  It's our job to clean up the mess it revealed.  

It's election season.  Let's get to work.  This democratic republic is worth saving.

Happy Fourth of July, denizens!