Fourth of July

Happy (wet) Independence Day. What a great holiday, where we get to celebrate our freedom to do pretty much whatever we want, including consuming unholy amounts of grilled, processed meats. I’m pretty sure we abandoned years of vegetarianism when our oldest son discovered hot dogs at a 4th of July family picnic at the age of six. It was the first in a long line of epiphanies for him, which only confirmed his growing suspicion that the adult world was deliberately concealing the coolest (and tastiest) things in life.

 

Fourth of July is a low stress holiday, as opposed to Thanksgiving or Christmas  which are characterized by demanding familial expectations and confinement in small spaces, with relatives who are trying to mitigate their claustrophobic anxieties by consuming as much alcohol as possible before the big fight begins.  All those anxieties might still exist at the height of summer, but at least we get to be outside where we can put distance between our troubles and petty squabbles.

 

I’ve always considered fourth of July a kids holiday because it was one of the few times as a youngster that we had license to run around the block making as much noise as we wanted and burning an endless supply of sparklers in each others faces without having an adult yell at us because we might poke someone’s eye out. They were all too busy drinking beer and burning slabs of meat.

 

But the best part of this suburban bacchanal was not the lawlessness, but the grab bag that miraculously appeared on the porch for each kid in every household in the neighborhood. The plain brown lunch bag was a treasure trove of great stuff which had a half life of exactly one day. The usual contents consisted of bubble gum, maybe some hard candy, a set of jax, caps for our gun (that wouldn’t happen today), and a pimple ball. This last gift actually survived for a few weeks beyond the holiday. The pimple ball was the official summer ball which would keep us occupied until we were fitted with new and painful school shoes in September. This innocuous rubber ball, decorated with embossed runes served as source every imaginable ball game we could devise – wall ball, step ball, curb ball, stick ball, wire ball and when it finally succumbed to being split in two by a grand slam, half ball. Pummeling this innocent sphere into oblivion was basically our profession for the few months we were allowed to terrorize the block like a horde of banshees.  And there was absolutely no chance you could put someone’s eye out with it.