Morning Thanks--The Fourth

Nothing was better than the Fourth. Nothing. Not Christmas, not my birthday, not the first day of vacation. Nothing shines in my memory like the Fourth, and we never left town.

It was a Legion thing. Booths all over the park were run by vets. Hoop toss, ring toss, darts and balloons, games that usually rewarded your nickles and dimes with some silly thing--a key ring, a braided finger trick, something totally useless made in Hong Kong, but a prize nonetheless. One of the booths featured a net strung up and stuck with maybe fifty wooden canes, some of which had standard handles, and others--the real prizes--topped with porcelain softball or the head of a bulldog. Put a ring around one of those babies, and you were set for strutten' in the park--Veterans Park--all day long.

Hawaiian leis, too, in abundance, so many hanging around your neck the Fourth could look like Mardi Gras. Buy three darts, poke three balloons stapled to corkboard, and win a big pink dog to give to your sweetie. 

That was part of it, too. At the park on the Fourth there were girlfriends. Didn't have a clue what kind of stuff we were dealing in, but somehow on the Fourth in the park, you could chase girls and get lost, totally get lost in the joy. 

We were Dutch Reformed so there was no beer tent, but there were brats and double brats and Oostburgers, a hamburger topped with what my mother insisting on calling "a porkie," everything grilled right there at the heart of things, where a dozen men and women, maybe more, tried to keep ahead of the orders. Pop from a tank, Springtime, brewed locally--glass bottles cold as ice, soaking wet. 

A man named Les Ludens played a little Wurlitzer up on the bandstand for most of the afternoon, He'd string together a medley of patriotic tunes that I swear I can still hear if I listen closely. He wasn't trained professionally, but it might have been impossible to have a Fourth without him. For all I know, he's still there. The man played by ear mostly, and my mother, who taught piano, winced a little when the tune would once in a while lose its way. 

My dad, himself a vet, refused to buy tickets for the drawing--proceeds go to the Legion--because he, like his father, stood foursquare against gambling of any kind, even the Legion's once-a-year drawing. He didn't rail, just looked the other way, even though the company he worked for donated one of the grand prizes--a cement mixer. Then again, there was the year his brother won. I was older then, and I couldn't help giggling. 

The memory is really faint, but very real. I was very young one Fourth, but I remember being part of what my parents called "a pageant," one of a cast of hundreds of townspeople, old and young, to parade over a portable stage during what I think was a hour-long tour of American history, maybe a reading of the Gettysburg Address. I was a first-grader maybe, something less than a decade having passed since the Second World War drew to a close in the Pacific. Hitler was dead and Hirihito was history. On the Fourth, the community was pumped for the grand old flag. 

I don't remember the pageant well, but I will never forget what I felt, strangely, when the chorus---I think I was a part of the chorus--belted out a kind of hymn that had lots of folks bringing their hands to their hearts even though it wasn't the Pledge or national anthem. It just came naturally, and I felt it myself, felt something alive in me, something responding over and above my own will. I don't know that I'd ever felt anything like that before--something electric that somehow made me want to cry, not out of fear but for joy.  

"This is my country"--that was it, an anthem born from the Second World War, not much older than I was. I don't think I've heard it sung in public for sixty years. "This is my country"--with its soaring, full-octave leap in that first line, and its oath of loyalty. 

I'm pledging my allegiance--
America, my home, 
for this is my country, 
to have and to hold.

Like a marriage vow--lyrics carried right out of a marriage vow: "to have and to hold." I don't think I understood that at all, but there I was, a little boy in a crowd of people, most of whom I knew, singing music that right then and there on the Fourth of July found a place so deep in my soul that just hearing a line of that old favorite still opens the same vein it did way back then, sixty-some years later. 

And then fireworks. Lots of them. Lights out all over the park, dozen of fountains spinning showers up against the dark cloud of night to never-ending ooohs and aaaahs, until finally, right there behind third base on the softball field, a burning display lit up to become that same grand old flag.

And then, sadly, it was over. The Fourth was history.

My sister, who still lives in Oostburg, says the doings on the Fourth are over now. Nothing's goes on in the park--maybe someone grilling porkies--that's it. None--or very few--of those WWII vets are around to run the games or hoist Les Ludens' organ up on the bandstand. The factory that made cement mixers is long gone. People rarely spend the holiday at home.

I hate to think of the Fourth not being the Fourth. But I'm a day's travel away, and even if nothing had changed, even if the park was full of people, I'd likely not be making the trip home. Mom and Dad are gone too.

But something remains in my soul, a ringing, singing memory, a pageant of life itself that emerges from just a few bars of patriotic hymn I remember singing when I was a kid--on the Fourth. For all of that, I'm thankful this morning, the Fourth of July. 
_________________________ 

Here's Tennessee Ernie Ford's rendition of that soul-stirring, patriotic hymn.