Born on the 4th of July

My dad burst into the world on the 4th of July in the bedroom of a farmhouse surrounded by cornfields in the United States of America.  Born a natural citizen of this country, he was most likely greeted by the whine of mosquitoes and the boom of fireworks set off by a bunch of drunk men down the road.  He was poor, but he was male and white and as it turned out, in this country, two out of three wasn’t bad.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army at the age of 19 and as there were no wars going on to die for at the time, was sent to serve on a base in Germany where he adapted to military life with the stoic constitution of his German heritage and had the time of his life.

Within months of returning from Germany, he married my mother, a woman he’d met at a dance while he was home in the states on leave.  They couldn’t afford to buy any of the wedding photographs snapped by the photographer that August day, so the only photos we have are candid snapshots of their early moments of wedded bliss.  There is one black and white photo of her looking like an angelic Sophia Loren in a simple white wedding gown.  He is standing slightly behind her looking disheveled, handsome and happy.  On the table in front of them there is a small goat, looking bewildered. One of the guests that day had dyed the goat pink and given it to them as a wedding gift.

Sometimes I wonder if they were perhaps the only couple in matrimonial history to receive a pink goat to commemorate their nuptials.  And sometimes I wonder if that goat was a sign of the chaotic, bewildering but strangely beautiful years to come.

My father whisked his bride away from city life and set her up in a rented house in the middle of rural USA.  My mother, born poor, white and female had two strikes against her coming into life and according to my maternal grandmother, my Dad was strike three. My grandmother didn't trust my father and feared the influence he would have in her daughter's life. My father, in return, didn't trust my grandmother and feared the influence she would have over my mother's life. They never “got on”, as Grandma said, but shared their love for my mother in a kind of armed neutrality, silently passing the apple pie across countless dinner tables through the years.

Mom adapted to rural USA with the stoic constitution of almost any woman marrying almost any man in midwestern America in the early 1960’s.  She went where her husband went, from house to house to house, raising vegetables and children, canning beans and frying chicken and waiting for him to come home from work, or a meeting, or the tavern. She made few decisions and had few choices.  She chain- smoked, volunteered at church, drank iced tea and read Harlequin romances. Meanwhile, Dad chain-smoked, built houses, succeeded and failed in various businesses and got passionately involved in local politics, all while drinking foaming rivers of beer.

I am fairly positive that my highly intelligent and generous father suffered from an undiagnosed mood disorder and ADHD, both of which he tried to cure with alcohol, and that my mother suffered from the crippling anxiety that comes with having little control over the course of one’s life.

They were both good citizens, good neighbors and good parents. They worked hard and raised their four children with all the love they had to give to the absolute best of their ability. They worked together to better their community and the lives of the people in it.  They helped others carry their burdens when they could and shared what they had with those less fortunate, all while struggling with their own private burdens and misfortunes.

He loved her and she loved him until death parted them, which, in their eyes, the eyes of their community and I like to think, the eyes of God, made their marriage an overwhelming success.  When he lay dying in an intensive care unit at the age of 63, she stood beside him, running her hand through his hair and whispering to him.

“We had fun, didn’t we, honey?” I heard her ask, but he was sedated with a ventilator tube in his mouth and so there was no answer.  It was, perhaps, the only time in their married life when she had the last word.

Today on the 4th of July, almost 25 years after my father’s death, I reflect on my parent’s ordinary American lives and I realize that here in America in 2024, there are still varying degrees of freedom.  Rich people are still more free than poor people, men are still more free than women, white people are still more free than people of color, heterosexual people are still more free than LGBTQ people, mentally and physically healthy people are still more free than mentally or physically ill people, and the list goes on.  

I’m so grateful that those disparities in freedom are slowly changing but in the midst of my gratitude is sorrow that the process of change is so chaotic and painful and that change has caused more division than unity among Americans.

Emma Lazarus, who wrote the poem enshrined at the base of the Statue of Liberty, once said, “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”  Sometimes I wonder how many more centuries will pass before the truth of those words finds its way into the ordinary American conscience.

As fireworks shoot through the skies tonight, they will burst over crowds of Americans existing with each other in a state of a tenuous armed neutrality, each one of us cherishing the idea of freedom for ourselves but fearing the idea of freedom for others.  This is a natural fear that we can probably trace all the way back to the earliest days of humankind when we first figured out that life was cruelly biased toward survival of the fittest.  But just as we all must get over our natural fear of falling in order to walk, this natural fear of freedom for others is something we must conquer if we really want freedom for ourselves.

But it’s scary, isn’t it? It's scary no matter who you are.

Maybe the best we can do on a 4th of July like this one with a frightening election looming in the distance is to remember that all of us share our love for one country and keep our fears to ourselves as we pass the apple pie.