marching on

For someone who never really got the hang of patriotism and probably never will, July 4th sure does stick better in my memory than most holidays. Past Christmases blur together, so do birthdays and Easters, but I can feel my way back through the long chain of ghosts of past July 4ths in my memory. I was here, I was here, I was biking along the Erie Canal, I was home alone with my parents' dog who was panicking with every loud noise, I was walking along the river with a favorite uncle who was whistling the Star Spangled Banner, I was in Nashville, I was on my way home from Ohio, I was in Austria and the only reason there was celebration was that the 4th happened to coincide with the 2004 Europe soccer cup thingy, I was in the back seat of a 15-passenger van, craning my neck for signs of fireworks in the towns we passed through on the way home from Kentucky, I was anxiously circling a neighborhood on foot, looking for the stupid labradoodle I was dog-sitting for who'd somehow gotten past her electric fence. All the way back to middle school I could tell you where I was and how it felt. Maybe I've thrown my string of memories off, though, by doing the same thing two years in a row. A waterfall. A tour of the back roads. Mint tea. Lexington. A long highway back home with my head everywhere else, watching fireworks in the rear-view mirror.