Independence Day
Today was July 4th. My whole life, July 4th has been a very special day for me. It began in my memory when I lived in Costa Rica in 1959 and 1960. As expats in a small far-away land, we were invited to the U.S. Embassy Independence Day barbecue, which was herald each year on the grounds of the Embassy in San Jose. It was a special day and we used to make an event out of it by traveling the two plus hours from the tropical valley to the Southeast where the town of Turialba and the Institute where my mother worked were located. We would spend the night at the colonial-era hotel in San Jose where the wait staff all wore white cotton gloves and made us feel like kings and queens. We would dress up for the picnic as every American who was anyone would be in attendance and even though there would be lots of running around the grounds of the embassy, we wanted to all look our best. The fare was intentionally All-American with hot dogs and hamburgers the main entree with lots of watermelon and ice cream to follow. The fireworks at the end of the day were always a highlight and for a young American kid of five or six, and it was perhaps the best day of the year other than Christmas itself.
That sort of celebration leaves an indelible mark on a young kid, and I suspect it is the origin of my extreme patriotism. The years I next spent in Wisconsin and Maine also had Independence Day celebrations. In Wisconsin there would usually be some sort of grad school gathering with my mother’s fellow graduate students. That was always a pot-luck sort of affair with everything a lot less special than in the days at the Embassy. In Maine it was always an event for us since my mother ran the first women’s Job Corps Center in Poland Spring. That was an old grand resort on a hill in south-central Maine that leant itself to big lawn parties again with the hot dog and hamburger tradition with very similar accoutrement like watermelon and ice cream. There were twelve hundred inner city young women plus their attendant staff, so it was a BIG party and always ended with hilltop fireworks. Since the Job Corps was a U.S. Government operation, that felt a lot more like the Costa Rican Embassy picnics.
From Maine, my family and I moved to Rome, Italy. Rome was a much bigger and more important embassy than existed in Costa Rica, but the tradition of an Independence Day blowout celebration was just as important. The party was much bigger, even bigger than the Job Corps shindigs since there were lots and lots of Americans in Rome in the late 1960s. The Embassy arranged for the gathering to be at a large farm outside of Rome on a hillside, not far from where some of us had recently been taken to film that famous Coca Cola commercial where we all sang “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony. I’d like to buy the world a Coke, and keep it company.” Coke may have been the real thing, but the Embassy party celebrating July 4th was the really special thing for most of us.
Once again, it was all about All-American fare with hot dogs and hamburgers and a raft of ice cream in Dixie cups where you shiver more from the dry wooden spoon than the cold of the ice cream. I remember those parties as the event of the year for us and we even took our non-American friends since there was very little ability for the embassy to police who was and wasn’t American and no one was too worried in those days about security. The ugly American may have already been an image reality, but terrorists weren’t yet really targeting us as they tend to today. I remember those gatherings as the place where I first saw bellbottom jeans (a rage to be sure) and saw my first braless American babe (she was a big hit with my gang of horny high school males).
Once I moved back to the states, the tradition of the Independence Day grand picnic got lost in the shuffle of first college summer days and then suburban existence where you may have gotten some hot dogs and fireworks, but the large gathering component seemed to give way to smaller, more sedate gatherings.
I spent another stint overseas when I worked in Toronto for two years. I don’t recall any embassy party or invitation thereto. Maybe the proximity to the U.S. made it impossible to have such a generous give-away or maybe I just wasn’t in the right loop at the time. I probably spent Independence Day back in the U.S. anyway, most likely at my home in Quiogue out in the Hamptons. There was probably a hot dog involved along the way, but fireworks were probably optional or incidental. The whole patriotic aspect of the occasion was fading away in my consciousness, which I noted to myself was not such a good thing. The country needed patriots more than ever as the world turned more and more negative towards America and Americans.
Since meeting Kim and since her birthday is on July 2nd, we have generally planned out big trips around the Independence Day holiday. On most years that found us overseas. One year in Italy, the next in Normandy, the most recent in Ireland. We even spent one trip (2007) in Morocco. During none of these gatherings, which are heavily populated by family and close friends, did we seek out the local embassy picnic, but we did make sure to celebrate in a somewhat subdued manner, noting that we were American abroad in a somewhat hostile world. These have all been fun trips, including the famous gathering for Kim’s birthday at Hearst Castle, but they have had less patriotism as a theme than I grew up with.
It is no wonder that I am as patriotic as I am. I think many people who live their early life as expats must turn out this way. Today we are having our own version of an embassy picnic here at Homeward Bound in Ithaca. We have games and a sort of Independence Day Olympics planned along with a nice barbecue. Since we grilled hot dogs and hamburgers yesterday, we will be having shush kebabs today, but the look and feel of the day promises to bring back all the memories I have a July 4th picnics gone by. It won’t be on embassy or Job Corps grounds, but we do have a load of bootlegged fireworks to shoot off, so it will still feel like Independence Day to me.