A Celebration's Postscript

What’s that sound?  It had been a late night prior, and the heavy brocade curtains in our room at Boston’s Parker House effectively muffled the outside world. But as I shook off sleep, I thought I heard… drums?

 

Omigod! Drums! “Dave! Wake up! The parade’s starting!”

 

It was 9:30 AM, the morning of the 4^th of July, and the Declaration of Independence would be read at 10:00 from the balcony of the Old State House as it was to Bostonians 245 years ago. One of our reasons for this visit to Boston was to be present for that reading. 

 

We scurried about our 7^th floor room, donning jeans and jackets, and grabbing raincoats and umbrellas, then dashed to the elevator. The doors opened to reveal a couple in full red, white, and blue regalia: beads, hats, and tee-shirts. Our lack of visible patriotism was ever more evident when we left the hotel and joined a similarly bedecked throng heading to the square, the trill and thump of fife and drum coaxing our footfalls into a rhythmic march. Thankfully, a city employee was distributing small flags which we gratefully accepted. 

 

After days of rain, the heavens were kind, gray and churning, but so far, dry. With a boom of muskets and pounding of drums, the various bands and corps dressed in colonial garb assembled in the square beneath the East side balcony of the three hundred years-old brick building. Small children were lifted to parents’ shoulders as people poured in from surrounding streets. Strangers smiled at strangers and inched aside to allow others to pass as everyone pressed closer to get a good view.

After this year of Covid, mask-contention, insurrection, shootings, and racial strife, it seemed hopeful and fitting to merge with the multitude for greetings from Boston’s Black mayor, Kim Janey, and Black baritone Dana Whiteside’s magnificent rendition of “God Bless America.” Still, as we jostled cheerfully below the balcony, I couldn’t escape troubling images of other happy celebrants - at a concert in Las Vegas or a night club in Orlando - and headlines, crosshairs, and targets. While no shots rang out, this year’s reading seemed to hold added weight, as I pondered recent events and the country’s opposing factions. How might their interpretations differ in listening to the Declaration’s justifications for separation from a government seen as grievously flawed? 

 

In the Founders’ list of accusations against King George, I heard reflected Trump’s disregard for American traditions, laws, and public health: to me, grounds for impeachment, conviction, and removal. Conversely, those who stormed the Capitol on January 6^th claiming the revolutionary fervor of 1776 might point to some of the same statements as validation for their assault. 

 

The pandemic and January’s uprising were awakenings: we are not immune to the plagues and issues that challenged our ancestors. They are ever-emerging, and ours to address. Never have the people of the past seemed more real. 

 

During a 2019 visit to Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Dave and I participated in a reenactment of a debate over the Fugitive Slave Law and 1854 arrest of Anthony Burns. Burns had escaped slavery and lived in Boston as a free man for two years, but a probate judge bowed to the federal law and Burns was returned to his owner in Virginia. Bostonians erupted at this outcome, and one Amos Adams Lawrence remarked, “[W]e went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists."

 

For the reenactment, index cards bearing the names and assertions of those who’d attended the 1854 meeting were distributed to people who wished to take part. Slavery was abolished in 1865, but the injustices and discrimination of recent years infused the readings of the men, women, and children of all ages and colors who volunteered with an outrage as urgent in 2019 – and 2021 - as when Andrew Burns was led away in chains. The fury we gave those borrowed words was driven also by a sense of responsibility to those confined to the balcony in 1854. At that time, most of us would have been silenced: only white, male property owners had the right to speak.  

 

 

Truth is objective, but the reporting of history is not. It has depended on who held the pen, who knew how to write, who was allowed an education, and whose opinions and input were given credence. How many know the story of Anthony Burns? Or the names of suffragists Lisa Stone and Carrie Chapman Catt? Until recently, the horror of the Tulsa Massacre was largely suppressed, and the current uproar over Critical Race Theory demonstrates the resistance that remains to teaching America’s failings as well as our achievements.  

 

On Sunday, we gathered, jubilant in celebrating 245 years of democracy and progress as clouds of confetti shot skyward in a celebratory whirl. Those once silenced now can speak. Tragedy and activism have spurred wider awareness; and in teaching the whole story, we move forward together.

 

Epilogue: 

 

After the 1854 decision, Anthony Burns spent four months in jail in Richmond, VA and was then sold to David McDaniel of North Carolina. Fortuitously, Boston abolitionists learned of Burns’ whereabouts and raised $1300 to buy and free him. Burns went on to be educated at Oberlin College and became a Baptist preacher in Ontario, Canada. In 1862, he died of tuberculosis at the age of 28.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Summer Reflections Part I - Ripples

Sunlight glinted on choppy wavelets tinted neon blue through my sunglasses.  My fingers were curled tightly around a strap across my seat.  Soul light, I leaned close to Joanne as we zipped, jolting and smacking, across the water.  Over the buzz of the Jetski’s engine, I yelled, “Look at us!  You and me and our four fake boobs!”

With her long white hair twisted into a loose knot on her head, joy emanating from her face, she grinned back over her shoulder and called back, “Survivors!”

 

It had been years since Dave and I spent time with Charlie and Joanne.  We’d met in 1988 when our sons Tucker and Jake became friends.  Back then, Joanne wrote a column for the Greenwich Time and was re-decorating her house.  I was into quilting, crafts, and animal rights.  Our husbands loved playing guitars together, two aging hippies strumming Rolling Stones and Beatles songs.  Hm.  I say “aging,” yet we were still in our thirties.  Ah well. 

A lot has happened in the intervening years.

Dave and I moved to Easton.  Terrorism took out the Twin Towers.  Joanne got breast cancer.  Charlie had a heart attack.  Our kids grew up and moved on to their own lives.  I got breast cancer.  Joanne and Charlie moved to New Hampshire.  And finally, over the 4^th of July, we were able to accept their invitation to visit them in their now not-so-new home.

One afternoon during our stay, I sat on the dock with Jake.  His cousin Lauren was eager to rent a stand-up paddleboard.  “You better try it early on,” he said, “before the boats and Jetskis make it too rough.”

I scanned the crests and troughs of  water circled by pine-fringed shores and the mountains beyond.  A few boats dotted the lake, but surely not enough to stir the surface to this degree.  “But those boats are so far away…” I said.

“Yes.  But you know how it is when you drop a pebble in still water,” Jake said.  “The ripples just keep on going.”

Ripples.  I have always loved the possibilities, literal or not: a line in a book that resonates and leads to a new direction.  A random observation that sparks an idea and generates invention.  Small acts of kindness or valor that change lives or a world.  My friend Joanne, struck with cancer, coming through it, and helping me make it through my own…and now the two of us, jubilant together, sending ripples cascading in our Jetski’s wake.

On the morning of the 4^th of July parade, along with Charlie and Joanne, their kids, their kids’ spouses, their adorable granddaughter Abbey, and assorted siblings and cousins, we staked out spots with blankets and chairs under a spreading maple on the lawn of an antique colonial.  Nearby, an old retriever, the coppery fur of her muzzle gone to white, panted in the scant shade cast by her human companion’s beach chair.  

Vintage cars, fire engines, farmers on John Deere tractors, a troop of little girls in gauzy skirts and fairy wings, and, on roller skates, an aging majorette in spangled attire, glided past, some tossing candy to the small children who scampered to the road with hands outstretched.  

A skinny scrap of a guy in a straw boater and patriotic vest stood among his fellow WW II vets on a float draped in red, white and blue bunting, and lip-synced Jimmy Durante songs.  With the cock and shake of his head and a distinctive fake nose, he had Jimmy nailed. 

A convoy of vintage WW II vehicles rolled by followed by a float bearing the old men who’d once driven them.  I thought of Uncle Jack who, during his service in North Africa, drove an ambulance much like the one cruising past.  Dave’s father, Colombo, served in Italy in that war, and the third brother, Uncle Phil, was posted in the Pacific.  Miraculously, they all came home, but Cam, their sister, said of Jack, “He was too sensitive for war.  He never spoke about it when he returned, and he was never the same.”

“Always remember the soldiers,” Colombo once said to my daughter Casey.

With pride and a tug in my heart, I ran to the roadside to take pictures knowing the three brothers would have gotten a kick out of this day, and out of the role they played in giving us this opportunity to celebrate; extraordinary ripples from the sacrifices of brave old men - once brave young servicemen – waving as their floats drove by.