Stars and Stripes Forever

Rain in June is quite rare here in the Bay Area, but it rained all day so Bob and I stayed inside, moored to our computers. The highpoint of our day was when he showed me some film footage that someone had posted on Facebook of his old neighborhood in Cleveland: the 1959 Fourth of July parade. There was Bob was at age sixteen, a beanpole teen in an Uncle Sam suit; stars and stripes plus a stovepipe hat. As others in the parade marched by on the faded celluloid, the scene evoked memories of a bygone era: adults dressed as pilgrims, pioneers and patriots, small children costumed as Indians or cowboys, even smaller children encased in white boxes with dots (sets of dice), old men and women garbed in Revolutionary War costumes, flappers with long strings of beads dangling down their glittering chests, a formation of men in kilts with bagpipes, a troupe of cub scouts and last but not least, the Lewis and Clark expedition with Bob's kid brother Ralph clothed in frontier garb.

Mothers watched, wearing pleated dresses, plaid shorts or pedal pushers and sneakers. Chryslers and Ramblers drove by and American flags were waved while someone held up a sign that protested imported cars and championed Detroit-made vehicles. I was struck by the strong community spirit, by the absence of cell phones and by the homemade look of the gathering. All of the costumes looked as if they were sewn by Mother's loving hand. Some of them were makeshift, but many were quite elaborate. It looked like a lot of care and work had gone into their creation. It was moving to see that more innocent America, the prosperous one filled with community spirit and pride of country, compared to the broken model we have today.

Of course, there were a few absences in the American dream: I saw no black people, no Hispanic people and no openly gay people in the crowd. Neither did I see any obese people. There were a few plump toddlers and some of the mothers were a bit too snug in their shorts while the older men had slight potbellies, but none possessed the gargantuan girth that has become a fairly ordinary sight these days.