"...sandy
the fireworks are hailin' over little eden tonight,
forcin' the light
into all those stony faces left stranded
on this warm July..."
"4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" - Bruce Springsteen
We got the kids to bed, but we got the kids to bed don't mean what it used to not so long ago. We now means me and my moms, with my dad passed out on the living room couch and my wife layin' six feet under the ground up in the hill on the outside of town.
The little ones fast asleep, and the oldest, ten now, down the block, at his buddy's house. I can hear them from here, lighting off fireworks and listening to a mix tape that goes from Led Zep to Eminem to Metallica to Buddy Holly, chasing each other 'round the block.
Me, I'm looking for a sound a little mellower. I pop in the headphones, I got the cell phone right next to me, in case the oldest acts up and they have to send him home here in the last hour of Independence Day, 2009. Told 'em to call the celly if shit happens.
I open up the player and find something quiet, first a little Bruce, "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)", then some Jessica Lea Mayfield, "Kiss Me Again."
She sings it, "I guess we got to play, the cards we been dealt, and I guess I got nothing, but whatever happens, happens, 'cause my life, is fallin' apart, or is it getting better, I don't know."
Is it getting better, or not? I don't know.
&&&&
So Palin quits and gives this rambling press conference and we all have a good chuckle, but for me, it's a very, very nervous chuckle, I don't know, she gives me the shivers, and I don't mean in a good ol' "was she winking at me?" kinda way.
She gives me the shivers in a what-if-shit-keeps-hitting-the-fan-and-it's-2012-and-people-have-gone-mad kinda way.
Yeah, she got laughed off the stage last year, but last year was last year. Collectively, as a nation, we seemed to want a calm and rational and intelligent adult to ride in to town and take over the production, and that's the way we voted and that's what we got, but still, we got problems, and they don't seem to have any intention of going the way of the all-emptied-out storm clouds that have only just ceded the skies of the northeast any time soon, do they?
&&&&
My son is ten. I remember the summer when I was ten, it was 1976, our bicentennial summer. I don't remember which day of the week the Fourth fell on that year, but I remember we had gone to visit my grandmother. She lived in a big white and red house that sat on almost an acre of land in a suburb maybe an hour outside of New York City. We, meanhile, lived in a housing project in a town a couple of hours north from her. I remember how quiet and deserted it seemed at her house. All that land to run around on, but nobody to run around there with us. It seemed unnatural. It seemed like the natural order of things was that you lived on top of everyone else, and that you had a shitload of other kids your own age living on right on top of you, and you played and argued and talked shit and dreamt and fought with them, and deep into the night, you listened to their dads beat them in their small spaces. Small apartments and tiny green spaces that you turned into your own little Yankee Stadiums and Fenway Parks of whiffle ball. I loved my grandmother to death but I felt so ambivalent about going to spend a week or two at her house every summer; it seemed lonely and vast there at hers, it seemed wrong that you had all that land, a whole damn real football field's worth of land, but with no other kids to play with, just some barely known uncles getting drunk down in her basement for company.
I had a serious colonial history jones back then. I suppose I still do. I lived and breathed The Revolutionary War. My favorite character of the 1770's era was Samuel Adams. In high school, faced with the task of writing about something, anything, almost any topic in the entire history of the United States of America from the first attempts to settle Roanake Island in 1587 or so up through the Watergate crimes, I chose to write a thirty five page screed about him, penned mostly while I watched my grandmother die of lung cancer in the den of her house, a paper named something along the lines of, "Samuel Adams: The Indispensible Patriot." Ironic, considering that I'd grow up to love a beer named after him. Among many other things, I loved the fact that he just couldn't bring himself to take any pounds of flesh for the King from any struggling Bostonians when he served as a tax collector in the 1750's and 1760's.
&&&&
On the morning of July 4th, 1976, my parents loaded their four kids into their Ford Fairlane, backed out of my grandmother's driveway, and headed off toward New York City. The harbor there held innumerable "Tall Ships", but we held no use for that display: my father had six tickets for the holiday Mets-Cubs doubleheader going down at Shea Stadium.
We sat in the mezzanine level. I was, and remain to this day, a Yankees fan, and my dad grew up as a Bronx Bombers fan, but he came to hate them after the detestable George Steinbrenner took ownership of the team (happy birthday, George!). He said he wouldn't be caught dead in the new Yankee Stadium; with George in control, he saw the grass and dirt once patrolled by DiMaggio and Mantle and Berra as desecrated ground. He'd take his children to see the Mets instead.
I don't remember hardly anything from that doubleheader. I don't remember who pitched, though I have the vague sense that Mickey Lolich, in all his beer-gut splendor, threw one of the two games for the home team. What I do remember is this: a sun-splashed afternoon; Dave Kingman swinging mightily and hitting a majestic foul ball that soared slow and high behind the catcher, so high it seemed it might sail right over the upper-deck seats behind home plate; and four older drunk guys sitting in front us. In the late innings of the second game, three of them got up and staggered off to the exits, leaving the fourth passed out, snoring in his seat.
I remember poking my dad and saying, "hey dad, those guys left their friend there, how's he gonna get home?" I remember my dad laughing, almost hysterically, I remember him telling me, "he'll get home." An inning or so later, the three men staggered back to the seats and poked their sleeping friend in the chest. "Wilbur! Wilbur! Wake up man! It's time to go home!" I remember Wilbur stirring, I remember him and his friends and my dad laughing as he clumsily stood up and zig-zagged his way out of his mezzanine seat and on home. Someone, I don't remember who, pitched the last of the ninth, and the sun almost set, and we walked out of the stadium and found our car and drove on home back to my grandmother's house.
&&&&
Tonight, it's still easy for me to remember that day, America's 200th birthday. It's still easy for me to remember how much I believed in America back then. I still remember believing that because we always made it, we always would. I remember reading everything I could get my hands on about The Battle of Bunker Hill: we fought hard and we lost only because we ran out of bullets in the end, even holding our fire until we saw the whites of their eyes couldn't save us, but we kicked some ass and taught the bad guys some lessons and we showed 'em that they had a fight on their hands.
I may not have had much, but I had a Rawlings Joe Rudi baseball mitt and I had my friends and my sisters and my brother and I had my mom and dad and to top it all off I lived in the greatest country the world had ever seen, and all of that seemed like more than enough.
But I don't know anymore. I still believe in us like I did then, but as I sit here wide awake in the middle of the night, down to my last two beers in the fridge, down to nothing more than the vague hope that life might turn out better than this someday, down to my last few bullets, trying to hold my fire until I see some whites in some eyes, it's a little harder. To believe.
Unemployment's higher than it's been in more than two decades and it looks like it's gonna get worse, and there's no guarantee it's gonna get better. The bought-and-sold fuckers down in DC look like they're about ready to retire to a nice cocktail party and sell us out on health care; it's hard work doing the bidding of your masters, after all, and as a wise man named Paul Westerberg once sang, "a person can work up a mean, mean thirst, after a hard day of nuthin' much at all."
And my babies lay fast asleep, and oldest must be asleep by now, and their mother is dead. I take off the headphones. It's a cool and quiet night. The cool air seeps across my back, across my calves, and it refreshes. Down the street, down the corner where the oldest lies asleep, I can hear the vague sound of grownups talking, I can't hear what they say, and their music moves again, from Neil Young to The Who, and someone sparks up a few fireworks that whistle through the smalltown night. One day, seemingly out of nowhere, you wake up and find yourself in an ICU ward watching the best thing that ever happened to you dying in front of your eyes in a hospital bed at the not-so-ripe old age of thirty-eight, you watch this as your three children, one of whom is a mere fourteen months old at the time, you think, these things don't happen to me, these things happen to other people, the same way you watch some other country collapse and think, well, that could never happen here, and I can hear that violin from "Baba O'Riley" rippling through the dark and the quiet, and it's nighttime in America, and who the hell knows what the morning will bring.