As It Were

On July 4ths

Something I always like about holidays is the way they make me think back to where I was the last time that holiday happened. I think it’s a pretty good way to track your life and see, if not where it’s going, at least where it’s come from. So in that spirit, I bring you Ryan’s July 4ths, past and present. 

1.  July 4, 2008: Whitesburg, Kentucky—This July 4th I spent watching TV and cooking with Matt, grilling burgers with some people I work with at my boss’s house, and then watching fireworks and an epic rainstorm from her porch. Until this summer, that kind of social situation would have given me a mini-panic attack. I would have spent the whole time acutely, painfully aware of just how much younger Matt and I were than everyone else there (5-20 years). I think that being in school for so long has left me half-convinced that it is only possible for me to interact with people who are my age +/- about 2 years. But in the Whitesburg micro-universe, you definitely can’t break down into that narrow of an age category, and what’s more important, no one expects you to. People here talk to me as though I’m an adult. Sometimes it makes me feel like an impostor, a child trying to slide by unnoticed in the Real Adult World. But more often it’s just nice. Tonight, for instance, it was good to just sit with people I like and not worry if I was old/cool/good/interesting enough to be there. 
   
2.  July 4, 2007: Rome and the Italian countryside—Midway through the world’s most haphazard and chaotic and totally amazing trip through Europe, Vivienne and I were plowing through Rome’s most touristy of touristy spots-the Colosseum, the Forum, the Vatican. We’d been in the city for three days, in Europe for three weeks, and July 4th felt novel and bizarre. A couple nights earlier, our campsite had thrown a party complete with a large fireworks show. That evening we’d sat in our cabin drinking swigs of some cheap, sticky yellow liqueur and the whole thing struck us as wildly amusing, though of course the timing was just a coincidence. I remember meeting other Americans along our trip who said July 4th in Europe was fun—people bought you drinks in bars and you sloppily sang the national anthem with anyone else who knew the words. But we spent ours on an overnight train to Switzerland, sitting across from a 60-year old Italian woman who didn’t speak any english but smiled at us a lot. We ate cheese and olives and talked with a closeness born partly of having been together so long, but also partly (i think) of the strange, disorienting act of traveling, of moving, of constantly being between places. And then when it was late we unfolded our beds from the wall and fell asleep with the wheels clicking against the tracks below us. 
   
3.  July 4, 2006: St. Louis, Missouri—I’d spent months obsessing about coming to the Telluride Association Summer Program (TASP), a free six week seminar at WashU in St Louis that I’d won a spot in. A week before the 4th, I’d finally arrived, and when the holiday arrived I was still sorting through the disorientation of getting to know the people and place. But I was, far more than I’ve been any time since, simply excited, buoyed by the potential I felt in that experience, that summer. That evening, the 20 of us took a train into downtown St Louis. There was some kind of street fair on the edge of the Mississippi River and we frittered away the evening wandering up and down the crowded rows of vendors and watching a free concert by Hootie and the Blowfish (no joke…who knew they were still together anyway). Then we huddled on blankets under the St Louis Arch and watched fireworks. I sat with Spencer, a boy I could already tell would be my closest friend at TASP, and we laughed and took pictures and drew ink-smiley faces on each other’s feet. At some point, tired and hot, we made our way back to campus and I fell asleep without even watching the sticky humidity out of my hair or clothes. 
   
4. July 4, 2005. Denver, Colorado—The exact details for this one break down on me, but I remember one thing vividly. I worked that night, my usual 5-10:15 pm shift at Rite Aid, where I’d taken a job (my first) about a month earlier. By the time it got late and dark enough for fireworks, most of the employees had gone home. The only people left were me, the spacy, aging-stoner supervisor who had taken an inexplicable liking to me, and a friendly middle-aged cashier who worked at Rite Aid in the evening after she got off her full time job. A few minutes before closing, we heard the fireworks from downtown and, with no customers in the store, went outside to see if we could get a better look. The entrance of the store opened in the opposite direction of the fireworks, but we could see them mirrored in a tall office building across the street. So the three of us stood there for several minutes and watched the glassy, wavery image of the fireworks reflected in the dark windows. Then we went back inside, counted out our registers, locked the doors, and left. If I’m remembering right, I think I spent the rest of the evening with Annie and Kara and a group that we called then and now The Poker Boys. They were a group of guys we’d met the previous month at History Day nationals and played poker with a couple times a week. They went to GW and seemed smart and funny and cute, though I think more than anything it was their simple boy-ness that got to us. We were giddy at the prospect of male friends, though of course that was a fragile giddiness, one the collapsed later in the summer from flirtation and jealousy and awkwardness. But on July 4th that hadn’t really begun yet, and it just felt exciting to have new friends and a way to kick away long summer nights. 
   
5.  July 4, 2004: Denver, Colorado—I have no recollection of this July 4th, but my early-high-school-years blog tells me I spent the day before composing a long treatise on the eternal greatness of pens with puff balls on the end. Enough said, I think. 
   

Well, this is pretty much the longest blog entry I’ve written in my whole life, and by my whole life I mean my whole summer.

Don’t get used to it.

(cross-posted)