Gearing Up for the Fourth

Still in the Big Orange…

Visiting family, and as it has been twenty years since we lived in California, enjoying being tourists.

Still on East Coast time it very early local time and I’m catching up on emails and such on my mother-in-law’s antique, and it appears steam operated computer.

Today is the Fourth. It will be another hot Southern California day. Temperatures hitting a hundred here and there, mitigated by the low humidity. The high spot will feature a vegetarian barbecue with Jan’s sister and her husband in their Valley back yard. Sadly they’ve been vegies so long they genuinely think ersatz burgers actually taste like meat. We’re bringing marinated portabella caps, which actually taste good & won’t make us sad for the lack of dead animal on the menu…

Truthfully fireworks will start too late for us to go on with the relatives to their favorite spot for the event, instead we’ll probably be awakened by the noise.

The Fourth.

The Fourth raises all sorts of complicated emotions for me.

On the one hand I’m an American born and bred. No doubt. It is one of the many categories that weave together and make James. And as I generally like James I am grateful.

And pride in oneself, in one’s clan, in one’s city and in one’s nation has salutary elements to it.

Of course there has been much blood shed by for and because of this nation. And that’s part of it, too. The good and the ill, all part of it, too…

While deeply respecting those who have given so much I also find it impossible to avoid recalling within this great mix how so so much evil follows nationalism and how thin the line between patriotism and nationalism. Perhaps no line at all, just a bleeding one way and the other…

Many many bad things lurk in the shadows of one’s love for country.

I find myself thinking of a baseball game auntie, Jan and I attended a few years ago. It was that delightful AAA style game at McCoy stadium in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The Pawtucket Red Sox, Boston’s farm team were playing the Toledo Mud Hens. It was baseball as it should be played. Half the people present were kids. No seat cost more than ten bucks.

And while several people on both teams could and would end up in the big leagues, there were enough more errors to spice the game.

Then a bit more than half way through one of the Sox hit a ball in a great loop out just short of the far wall. One of the Mud Hens leaped like a ballet dancer into the air in a swoop toward the ball, his body turning gently, he reached out and hanging there in the great emptiness his glove and the ball came together. Like magic.

The crowd erupted with amazement at the pure athleticism, the grace, the beauty of the moment.

Then in a moment they recalled they were on opposing teams and raised a half-hearted and totally unbelievable boo…

At that moment I felt life could not be sweeter…

And later thought would that we could find a way to celebrate our communal identities without having to make everyone else enemies.

It’s so hard. And there is so much mixed up in this.

But a small thought. One of many…

A little ahead of five in the morning Los Angeles time on the Fourth of July, 2011…