Independence Day and Thanksgiving define America

My father’s father – my grandfather – died in the depths of the Great Depression when my father was five. He was the second husband his mother buried. She then single-handedly raised my father, his brother and his half-sister.

For a few years anyway. My father flunked the sixth grade, twice. He dropped out of school altogether in the eighth grade to go to work to help support the family. Kids grew up early in those days.

He joined the army at age 17 just before the war ended, and served in Europe and Japan. He got his GED, and landed a job as an engineering technician.

He later became a civil service employee of the Defense Communications Agency where he worked as a self-taught engineer on the Early Warning System. For a time, he was stationed in the NORAD base under Cheyenne Mountain outside Colorado Springs, where he helped raise us four kids.

He loved to read. He read only history, science and biographies – no fiction, which he regarded as a waste of time – but he was painfully slow at it. It took him months to read a book. I remember him reading Stephen Hawkings’ “A Brief History of Time.” It took him most of the history of time to get through the book, but he loved it and often talked about it.

I decided after he died that he was probably dyslexic, which accounted for his difficulty in school back in the days when dyslexia was diagnosed as stupidity.

He used to tell the story that his mother, who was cantankerous and probably deservedly so, told him once “Your kids are sure smart. I don’t know why. You never were.”

His favorite holidays were Thanksgiving and Independence Day. As a kid, I always thought that was weird. After all, neither involved gifts to me. Independence Day had the fireworks, granted, and I’ve always loved fireworks and fire play, but it was no substitute for a new bicycle. Thanksgiving? C’mon, we always had enough to eat anyway.

I later realized that Christmas – a time of joy and excitement in our house – probably brought back unhappy memories for my father.

What he liked about the Fourth of July was that it celebrated a nation he truly loved. He was awestruck that he – he! – could achieve what he did. His sentiment was not founded in conceit for what he had achieved, but for love of the place that let him do so, a place rooted in the notion that all men were created with equal opportunity regardless of their circumstances or limitations. Merit counted for a lot, and effort accounted for even more.

Thanksgiving he loved because he loved the bounty. He used to say “I wonder what the poor people are doing today.” In the case of Thanksgiving, he was indeed indulging in a bit of conceit. He didn’t care so much about poor people; he just wanted his kids to know that they weren’t. 

My father died many years ago of liver cirrhosis. Like his mother, he could be cantankerous, and worse, and maybe deservedly so. I miss him.

This Independence Day, green shoots are sprouting across America. A post-apocalyptic lunar landscape of wokeness, Marxism, hatred and nihilism is giving way to a renewed appreciation and outright love for a country that is still the greatest in history, a country whose best days are still ahead, God willing. My father would be happy to see it this Independence Day, as am I.