Happy 4th of July.  Through force of habit, I must have e-mail wished it dozens of times in the past week but I didn't even remember that it was today until after I had been up for several hours.  So incredibly strange.   How can something as normal as breathing, a permanent fixture on the psyche and annual calendar; something supposly hardwired into one's DNA, get virtually eliminated, then never replaced?  

To me, the 4th of July is a reservoir of childhood. Still early summer, carbide canons from dawn to dusk, then snakes and sparklers, M80's, whistling Jupiter's before the main event, replicated in every municipality across the breadth and width of the US of A - the local fireworks. All the secrecy, the safety, the cover of darkness and sheer recklessness of being out when one would normally be in. If I close my eyes and think hard, I am back there and can still smell it all.

I was never actually home on the 4th. I was a majorette for a VFD (Volunteer Fire Department) senior baton corps. Every weekend of my summers was spent in a bus, traveling to little parades for competitions across the width and breadth of my contiguous states and even Canada. We competed for local prestige against local and far flung competitors with every bit of determination seen at the Wimbledon finals or a World Cup match - long before I ever knew, what either of those things were. 

The bus would drop us off at the band shell and we would go and find our parents. No cells or mobiles or any idea what time we might be getting back but no one batted an eye when some thirty-strong overexcited, no-name VFD Champs, spilled out of a bus and hoarse from singing, scattered in search of families. We never missed the firework finale and we never lost a soul. 

Not even this year.

-- 

Deborah Gale

Expatriate Living

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