July 4: Good and loud
A small Independence Day victory, and the real victories we celebrate.
Here is a July 4 story. A true one. About noise. And gratitude.
It was the evening of July 4, 1970 – time to pile into the car and drive down to Memorial Field in my home town of Summit, N.J. to catch the fireworks show.
I gulped hard and got into the car. I was about to turn 13. This should not have been hard.
Memorial Field is a glorious green space where we would exhaust ourselves on the swings, in the foursquare boxes, on the tennis courts next to Brayton elementary school. You know, just down the hill from Peter Nix's house, where we'd line up at the Good Humor truck to get Chocolate Eclair and Strawberry Shortcake bars and to confer about the girls in our 6th grade class at Brayton, and about who liked whom.
(Jim Hughes, my great friend then and now, reported one day that our classmate Christine had actually LICKED the remaining ice cream off the stick of his Chocolate Eclair bar, and I had no reason to think he was lying. This was crazy, but plausible. Maybe.)
Anyway, on July 4th, everyone went to Memorial Field for the fireworks. Mom and Dad and my little sister and my little brother sat with me on the grassy slopes off Ashland Road. The skies darkened. The rockets issued their red glare. And I held my breath. No one knew. No one knew that just being there (with my fingers plugged into my ears) was a major victory for the soon-to-be-teen me. I survived it.
I had always had a thing about noise. I hated loud noises. I hated what they did to my insides, how they made my heart convulse and rupture and behave as though the rockets' red glare was consuming my scrawny chest. This agitation about sudden blasts and booms led me, in prior years, to skip the July 4th drive to Memorial Field altogether. Even though my younger siblings went. It was awful, but I swallowed the embarrassment and just stayed home.
When my Dad got the urge to light firecrackers in the driveway before the real fireworks, I would slip into the house and make myself scarce. (Dad noticed. This did not arouse pride in him. Or sympathy.)
Anyway, on 7/4/70, I did it: I mustered the courage to go to Memorial Field, and when we sat on that grassy slope, I braced for the sounds of artillery. The aerial display delivered. I braced, held my ears, tightened my gut, and got through it.
I still don't love loud, startling sounds. But in my old age, I am sometimes reminded by those sounds of what other, braver young men — and boys — have endured. The bangs and booms. The report of a musket. Machine gun fire. Explosions. And the shrieks and wails that surely accompanied the noises.
Young men — not much older than I when my "victory" was achieved at Memorial Field — have endured, and produced, horrific sounds to protect the freedoms we enjoy.
"War," said FDR, "is young men dying and old men talking." William Diamond, age 16, played his drum for a Massachusetts militia as the first shots of the Revolutionary War whizzed by. Dan Bullock, an African American 15-year-old from Brooklyn, was the youngest American killed in Vietnam (apparently he had fudged the date on his birth certificate). Sixty-one percent of the men who died in Vietnam were 21 or younger. War is young men dying.
My own late uncle – Odell “Boe” Vaughn of Spartanburg, S.C. – lost his legs when he stepped on a mine near Pisa, Italy in 1944. It’s a story some of you have read about before.
It is hackneyed and sappy, I guess, to say that I am grateful for the many young people who endured noise — and terror and pain and loss — to protect and preserve the nation we celebrate on July 4th. But grateful I am. We stand on the shoulders of giants — some of them very young and diminutive giants. (If you'll pardon the oxymoronic phrase.) My, what they went through to ensure our freedoms.
I'm not sure that I, at 13, even gave thought to the reason that wonderful green space was called Memorial Field. Surely I knew! But of course I was focused on foursquare and the ice cream truck and female classmates and didn't give that name much thought. But in the years since I conquered the noise — the bombs bursting in air! — I have grown increasingly grateful for the ones whose lives are commemorated at Memorial Field and a thousand fields like it. I have knelt by the white crosses at the American cemetery at Normandy. I have reflected and prayed at Arlington. There is much to be thankful for.
Happy Independence Day.
(This post is a modified version of a Facebook post of mine in 2023.)
Loved this - Amen!!
Thank you for sharing your childhood experience in Summit. It brought back some wonderful memories for me. We were very blessed in growing up iwithin a great community.