July 4th's spectacular view

I was born at 11:17 pm on July 3, 1951. "Almost a firecracker," as adults used to tell me when I was a boy. The 4th was a wonderful annual event, for me, growing up on Lake James, near Angola, Indiana, and for everybody in America. I remember M-80s and bottle rockets, cherry bombs and sparklers, Kool-ade and Meyers hot dogs, marshmallows and Sunbeam bread, watermelons (chockful of slippery black seeds, for good spitting) and corn-on-the-cob. Oh yeah, and blueberry pie. That was and still is my intoxicant of choice on the 3rd of July.

The 3rd was my day on the beach at Glen Eden, then later on Glen Eyre. All the summer kids were there . . . meaning that on my birthday nobody had to do his math tables, read aloud for the teacher, practice writing, play a flutophone, sit still at his desk. All day in the shallow water or puttering around in the Alumi-craft or, a few birthdays on, swimming out to the pontoon raft anchored just where the lake bottom dropped away to a murky-green depth. The one with the fibreglass diving board and splintery planks whitewashed every spring by some grown-up or other. Dive off the shore side into a gold-flecked, warm shallow, find stones & shells. Dive off the other side into a black-green bottomless cold of weeds.

And the best gifts in the world! Bongoes one year. Always a new bathing suit, rubber flippers, face mask, snorkeling tube. Sometimes a baseball glove, a whiffleball or badminton set. One year, a subscription to Boy's Life. (Now I subscribe to My Generation.) Joe, my younger brother and the youngest of six, always a little steamed that I'm getting all this plus national attention.

Just at sundown, the boat parade. A flotilla of wooden Chris Crafts, fibreglass Crosbys, SkiNautiques, FloteBotes, and assorted trolling craft, canoes, skiffs, small catamarans, Sunfish. All the soft-throated outboard motors set at idle: Johnsons, Evinrudes, Mercuries. Some boats pulling inner tubes full of revellers. Everybody strung with lights and shooting bottle rockets off their starboards & ports, blaring horns, the big inboards growling & snorting, and of course, Old Glory flying from the stern of every floating thing. It's a wonder nobody ever drowned or got ground up in a propeller.

That parade, who organized it? Nobody ever seemed to know, it just happened spontaneously across the lake as the afternoon closed, every July 4th, with a hundred or more boaters falling into this giant conga line snaking its way through Lake James' three big basins. We waved from the shore, ran to the ends of our docks and waved and cheered. We pumped our forearms to get 'em to blow their horns loud, louder, loudest. What a birthday . . . America's and mine.

July 3 and 4, 2004. The 3rd is a Saturday which, as a good friend observed, is perhaps the best day of the week to celebrate a birthday. You get Friday night to prepare and all day Sunday to recover. You get, if you like, because it's still your day, an all-day respite from chores. Perfect strangers are in a celebratory frame of mind. The air pops & whizzes. Your mom calls. The blueberry pie's in the oven. On this day you're nobody's enemy.

On the 4th, we walk over to Ron and Alex's apartment in the 12-story tower across the street. We're invited to dinner and to watch the fireworks after dark. They live temporarily in a two-bedroom unit ten floors up while they finish building a new townhome. The apartment has a balcony with a southern view. From here we can see little downtown McLean, our town. From here we can see Tysons Corner, Gallerias I and II (which I affectionately call Sodom and Gomorrah). We can see a goodly swath of Northern Virginia, with Alexandria to the left, and the Potomac and Northwest D.C. to the right.

Ron's making risotto, his signature dish. He's worried about it, but he's confident too. He orders his arborio rice only from some town in Italy . . . not the kind grown in Texas or Louisiana or California. I watch him work the saucepans and pots and wooden spoons and knives. He's orderly, thinks ahead. He knows the steps & the timing. He produces . . . a perfect curry risotto. I am getting a day-after-birthday buzz (yes, a hair of the dog that bit me on my birthday) on champagne and, when that runs dry, red wine. How fine, how fine.

And then, as we finish our meal, the most spectacular thing happens. A July 4th spectacular thing. One or two fiery, sparkling blossoms appear out on the Virginia skyline, just now turning deep blue, then purple, then cobalt. One or two more colored star-bursts further along the horizon, with delayed rumbles and pops. And soon the entire skyline, from Potomac, Maryland up north to Alexandria, Virginia to our southeast--a full panorama of star bursts, smoke clouds, arcing tracers--lights up as every town with an Independence Day budget puts on its show. Vienna, Fairfax, Falls Church, Great Falls, Reston, Herndon, Arlington, Manassas, Fair Oaks.

It's one thing to picnic at your local community park to watch the fireworks close at hand. That's a good thing. That's America. But to see them all from a height, well, glory be! That's one for the ages. Like I said, what a birthday . . . America's and mine.