4th of July

Happy birthday, America. Three cheers for the money-bred, blight and blue. For your Statue of Bigotry. Your skid row(s), your mall street(s), your movie stars. Yeah, America, you’re all that. And a lot more, too.

On this day we assemble—a motley crew, an American bunch—at a place of relative privilege in a county known mostly for its wealth. But we ain’t none of us rich. We work, we worry, we move funds from this place to cover that. But there’s food on our table today—and lots of it. Even got a red, white & blue cake because someone besides America is having a birthday today, too. The cake comes with miniature flags attached to toothpicks, and long after the crowd has packed up and gone home, I find those flags littered over the ground.

So we spread our wealth out over two picnic tables pushed close together. There are many such tables here under the trees. Beyond us, gas grills, shuffleboard, ping pong, volleyball, a kiddie pool with an enormous ceramic whale that sprays water from its snout; and an Olympic size pool with two diving boards. Here is where we’ve come to celebrate the day. One (lovely) daughter of Israel; her Argentinian husband who took 15 years to tell her he is gay; their two black children who were caught as they slipped from the legs of unprepared mothers in Texas; an African-American man in white dress slacks who’s been kicking it in the Bronx just a few years too many; a 9-year-old East Indian boy who claims he’s the “third generation Moby Dick reader”; and a quiet couple who sits protective of a son whose mother dropped him off for a visit and never came back. And me, whoever I am.

And so? And so this is who we are, Americans all. Motley. Flawed. Connected. Working the American Dream, trying to get our slice, on this Independence Day. We don’t pledge allegiance or fly the flag. We don't pontificate. Don't have any answers. Don't know how to make things better--other than this.

I’ve visited every state in the U.S. except Alaska and Hawaii. (And I got it from a good source that I’m not missing much in the 49th-parallel.) First time I headed south was on a 6-week road trip, with a map of the U.S. and a copy of the “Jazz & Blues Lovers’ Guide to the United States.” Our first stop was in Memphis—walking the same streets, visiting the same haunts that Lucille Clifton would later reduce me to tears reading about. We ate BBQ and grits, and ended up hanging out one night with Clarence Gatemouth Brown himself. Then on to Sun Studios and, yes, after that Graceland. Headed out of Memphis along Route 66, past shotgun shacks, and into the Delta, looking for Robert Johnson's crossroads… And down into Louisiana, the bayou, Professor Longhair and a spicy crawfish stew. The muddy Mississippi before Katrina. Over to Austin and all that. Saw Gwendolyn Brooks read at the university. Hit the open roads of the American West where it made me feel lonely, seeing those houses standing alone, mute and isolated. Made me think about the women inside… Santa Fe, the Grand Canyon, Phoenix and Tuscon. And a long midnight ride through the Mojave Desert, the landscape in our headlights looking like the surface of the moon. And then…Cal-i-forn-i-a. Hell A, Hollyweird, Big Sur, San Francisco. Portland and Seattle. And an endless, sleepless drive through the entire state of Montana because “the rodeo was in town.” Yosemite. Mount Rushmore. And a wonderful Kansas City. Then straight-out-of-a-David-Lynch-movie, St. Louis, Missouri. To the Windy City and the Taste of Chicago, staying in some downtown hotel where you could feel the bullet holes from those long ago gangsters. And then, finally, home…

An American movie, that. Makes me tired just to write about it because there's so much in all that.

Now blow out the candles, America, and go back to your TV.