Haunted Jukebox

On the Fourth of July, my first task as a child was always to put out the flags. Every year, my parents and I marched in the local parade. By 10 AM, seemingly the entire neighborhood would meet up two blocks away from our house at St. Helen’s parish parking lot where each participant would receive a small American flag-on-a-stick to carry and wave in the procession. The three of us always hung onto them afterwards—I’m certain sticking a flag in the trash would’ve seemed unpatriotic (the worst thing to be on July 4^th!) so they sat on a basement shelf 364 days a year, gathering dust and seemingly multiplying. By age 12, we had accumulated nearly three dozen and you can sure as hell bet I planted every single one across our lawn, lining the sidewalks and increasingly any other available space in our front yard.

Once gathered at the lot, we would all walk together the two blocks west to 13^th Street to join a parade already in progress. For years, my mom helped decorate St. Helen’s parade float, always covered in red, white and blue crepe paper and similar crafty accoutrements. It usually had an appropriate theme (on the year of the Statue of Liberty’s 200^thanniversary, the float featured a small chintzy replica of it.) While my parents walked with other civilians besides the float, I marched as a member of the Cub Scouts, decked out in my navy blue, yellow-and-red kerchiefed uniform (swap blue for tan once I transitioned into Boy Scouts.)

Growing exponentially as other parishes and organizations joined up, the parade swelled to a veritable throng by the time we reached 16^th Street. We then all marched four length-wise blocks to Howard Avenue and entered Wilson Park. Our reward? A dixie cup of vanilla ice cream and a flat wooden spoon to consume it with. As temperatures spiked into the 90s and beyond, such a cheap treat never tasted so good (though not the year I came down with a nasty cold as the morning progressed; there’s a snapshot of me looking wretched and green in the face, however complimentary it was to my tan Scouts uniform.) At the park, we never stuck around for the talent competition although we had to at least stay for a judging of the floats. St. Helen’s was named Best Float the first three years Mom worked on it and I’d like to think she was chiefly responsible for these triumphs. Not for nothing had she mastered the art of cross-stitching, stenciling and other household crafting over the years.

Arriving home with our three additional flags in tow, I’d change out of my Scouts duds and we’d drive out to the suburbs to visit another family, longtime friends of my parents we often vacationed with. We’d have a leisurely BBQ dinner of grilled hamburgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob and baked potatoes with melted margarine, followed by fireworks at the local high school’s football field. It was a less impressive display than the “official” Milwaukee fireworks always put on by the Bartolotta Family on Lake Michigan the night before. We honestly had more fun setting off store-bought fireworks in the cul-de-sac by our friends’ home afterwards. Often, when lighting a flying lantern or a spark-spewing colorful fountain, one of the dads might (to a point of seeming almost comic) have to rapidly jump away from the now-lit fuse to avoid getting burnt before the sparks materialized. Us kids were happy as long as we had our handheld sparklers and gunpowder snaps that loudly popped with minor smoke residue when thrown on the ground. I was most fond of those light sticks that glowed when activated by “breaking” them in the middle, tying them to strings where one could swing them around, otherworldly streaks of neon orange, green, yellow and blue illuminating the night sky.

By 16, I had quit the Scouts and rarely attended the parade and/or fireworks because I couldn’t get the day off from a series of menial retail jobs. A couple years later, I’d spend the holiday engaged in more age-appropriate activities like drinking at Summerfest on the Lakefront. One time, my friends and I showed up at the admission gate early on the Fourth to pay our fee to Henry Maier Festival Park for the day and, more importantly, get our hands stamped so we could attend the Violent Femmes concert at the park’s Marcus Ampitheater that night for free (albeit with upper lawn seating.) Each night of the 11-day festival would conclude with fireworks although for us, they ceased to be the main attraction, not when there was Sprecher Beer on tap, Venice Club’s fried eggplant sticks with rich marinara sauce for dipping and Gordon Gano and company wailing out “Blister In The Sun” to an appreciative hometown audience.

A year after moving to Boston at 22, my parents visited me on Independence Day primarily so they could in person watch the Pops perform their annual concert on the Esplanade followed by fireworks. The first year of this ritual, we thought we were clever arriving there by 10 AM to secure a seat at the Hatch Shell. Of course, the concert space and its immediate perimeter were already standing room only. We found a grassy, shady spot further away, out of sight of the stage but presumably with a view for the fireworks. We claimed this space and stayed put all day. Temperatures reaching the mid-late 90s by noon, Mom and I walked over to the Star Market at the Prudential Center to replenish our food supply while my dad sat on a blanket in the shade, thrilled not to have to move.

Even though we couldn’t literally see the concert, we did watch it on a big remote screen set up nearby. When fireworks finally commenced around 9:45 PM, the trees that had made the sweltering muggy day somewhat bearable now blocked our view. We stood up, gathered our blanket and cooler and navigated the crowd to get as close to the Charles River as we could. It was a dazzling display, certainly dwarfing even my hometown’s Bartolotta extravaganzas; still, I remember the crowd more, the Esplanade swarming with a whopping 300,000 people that night. Getting out of there was a lengthy, slow-as-molasses process. We eventually made our way to the adjacent Storrow Drive, closed to traffic so that us and thousands of participants could walk along it to disperse from the masses all the way through Kenmore Square and down Beacon Street to my parent’s hotel in Brookline.

My folks came back to Boston three more times for this exact experience over the next decade. On the second of these return jaunts, I met up with them for lunch in the North End, then parted ways, strategically deploying the excuse of attending a party at a friend’s house in Cambridge. Fortunately, I still got to see fireworks that night as a dozen of us walked a mile or two from the party down to the Charles River to watch the display from the opposite side. A decent crowd had accumulated, albeit less than a tenth of the size of that on the Boston side. If I had lived in Cambridge, I’d consider making this an annual ritual. Instead, pushing 30, the tradition had lost some of its urgency. By then, I’d seen dozens of fireworks displays. In years to come, I felt satiated watching the Esplanade fireworks on TV (and often, not at all.) Call me officially an Old Man at that point. When my parents reached their 60s, they decided they had enough of the crowds as well and never requested to visit Boston on Independence Day again. Amazingly, they still hung on to all of those flags of my youth long after moving to another state. They finally disposed of them at a sanctioned burning of old flags (thrown by the local Boy Scouts, no less.) However, before giving them over to the flag inferno, my parents we required to remove all the sticks, tearing off a couple dozen of them one by one.

These days, for me the Fourth of July is strictly a day of rest and relaxation—in other words, a typical holiday. I usually try to grill on my back patio with a menu not far off from the dinners we shared with the other family back in the day (though I would never, ever use margarine.) With the current dubious political climate, I don’t feel a strong sense of patriotism anymore, especially as it’s increasingly twisted for ideological gains. Still, as frustrating, disillusioning and just plain backwards as it can be, I love my country, my home, the environment that made me who I am. Its flaws only provide motivation to stay here, fight the power and work together to make things better for everyone. On the occasion of the United States of America’s 250^th Birthday, I may even watch the Esplanade fireworks on TV tonight.