July 4th Dog's Eye Dispatch

Not From an Eagle's Perch

My email box, maybe yours, too, is being bombarded with Big Think reflections on America’s 250th birthday. David Brooks in The Atlantic! Heavy hitters from New York Times Opinion! An All-Star Roster from The Nation! Maybe I’ll get to some of them, but at the moment, I feel like a break from The Cosmic, the Meaning of It All.

So here’s a distinctly un-Cosmic perspective, not from On High but very much from the ground. I mean that literally. Jolly and I spent the morning at the annual 4th of July parade of my Cape Cod, Massachusetts town of Orleans. I’m sitting on a red-lawn chair, Jolly, a canine, sprawled next to me on the grass, both of us enjoying the shade of an impressive maple tree. The parade comes at us along Eldredge Park Way and hangs a right at Cranberry Highway.

There is, sadly and perhaps shockingly, a designated area for a “NO CANDY ZONE,” but happily, this party-pooper sign, big black letters on a yellow board, is ignored. Kids atop the parade floats toss plentiful handfuls to grateful children (and I guess some adults) among the spectators lining the road. Yay: it’s in our rebellious birthright spirit to flout such Big Brother-ish dictates.

A smattering of sights, sounds, impressions, all the pics shot by me:

Cheers of “USA,” shout outs—”thanks, guys”—to the police offers that start the parade. A marching Uncle Sam, fully decked out—of course. “Independence for ALL” poster. A large plastic shark mounted on the hood of an orange convertible, a boogie board propped up in the rear compartment.

Bagpipes. Jazz from “Cape Cod Sax Quartet.” Fife and Drum Corps, the marchers in smart red tunics and snow white trousers. A sound track blaring Stevie Wonder, “Sir Duke”: For there’s Basie, Miller, Satchmo/And the king of all, Sir Duke/And with a voice like Ella’s ringing out/There’s no way the band can lose/You can feel it all over…

A large dancing red lobster. More sharks. A sailboat. A Pride flag. A float garlanded in flowers. The Orleans Firebirds baseball team. (I have my ‘Birds cap on and cheer mightily.) Nauset Beach life guards. Suntan lotion. Big bubbles blown from the floats…

A fleeting memory of my Dad. Dad died earlier this year, at the age of 97. A few years ago, we escorted him to a similar local-style 4th of July parade, in Bath, Maine. He loved it! And he loved America with all his heart, not that he couldn’t see its faults.

Favorite float sign: “Married 250 Years. We’ve Had Our Differences. But We’re Still Together.” Pretty much.

I’ll leave you with Jolly, who enjoyed just about everything except the sound of the muskets fired by the Minutemen. Sorry, sweetie.

Actually, hold on. I do have a reading recommendation for our 250th, come to think. It’s Ed Simon’s new book, American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America. He’s editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books. We spoke yesterday for my American and Beyond podcast on the New Books Network and the episode should be up soon. The title and subtitle—Dis-United!—notwithstanding, I savored various offerings—the book is a medley of short, “flash” essays—as celebrations, really, of our ever jumbled but not always dissonant national spirit.

“General Tsao’s Chicken” is a must read in this ilk. My favorite is a meditation on “The Life and Death of Great American Cities,” the title of the 1961 book by Jane Jacobs that praised the glorious, unplanned messiness of a vibrant urban milieu, like the Greenwich Village of that time. In Simon’s words: “the yelling of street-corner fruit stands, the laughing of children playing jump-rope, the frenetic sermonizing of a street-corner preacher…the higher melodies behind the beautiful discord.”

Happy 250th America and Americans!