During summer vacations we followed the same routine like crazed ants at an endless picnic. I don’t remember anyone in our neighborhood ever going on an extended summer vacation, so we all just hung around together for those two humid months, going from one dwelling to another, eating our own and each other’s parents out of house and home. I found summer vacations so joyful. The days were long, allowing us to play outside until nine p.m., at which point we would have already negotiated a sleepover at one or another of our homes so that we might never be parted even in slumber. Summertime also brought my favorite holiday, besides Christmas: Independence Day, also known as the Fourth of July.
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When I was a boy, Fourth of July celebrations were very important in our family. At this time all or most of my family members who had been part of the great wave of Italian immigrants were still alive. Compared to the abject poverty of the Italian south, America held for them everything Italy could not offer or would not allow. It was in America that their dreams of a new and successful life came true. They created Italian enclaves all over the country by sending for family and friends once work had been secured. America gave them the best of both worlds: a country where prospects were many, and the opportunity to surround themselves with extended family. In this new world, they would birth new generations who had options available to them never thought possible in the poor and corrupt towns of Southern Italy. In America they worked together, grew together, and sometimes grew apart together.
Food was the connective tissue that brought them, again and again, into each other’s homes, backyards, front porches, campsites, beaches, and hearts. The lubricant that is wine ameliorated any squeaky emotional wheels, just as at times it was fuel for any dark and dormant emotional fires.
I remember many of these Independence Day celebrations being held at our house in northern Westchester. We would spend days preparing for the onslaught of relatives from both sides. Out of paper, string, and poster board, my father would make all of the decorations, from hand-painted pennants to red, white, and blue stovepipe hats. With the welding equipment he used to make steel sculpture, he would cut fifty-gallon drums in half lengthwise and place them on sawhorses. They were then filled with charcoal, and old steel fridge/freezer shelves were placed across the top, thus creating two enormous barbecues. Over these makeshift grills, the ubiquitous hamburgers and hot dogs were cooked alongside Italian sausages, a simple culinary representation of the melding of two distinctive cultures. The sausages were served on long wedges with slowly sautéed onions and red and green peppers. Jug wine was served, as well as glasses of beer straight from a frigid keg. In those days the ice came in blocks, not in bags of cubes, and as a young boy I relished the task of breaking it into smaller chunks with a deadly ice pick so that they would fit around the portly beer keg that sat in a basin wrapped in thick canvas, waiting to be tapped. For dessert, besides peaches soaked in wine, my mother always served a homemade rectangular sponge cake decorated with the Stars and Stripes. The surface was covered in white icing, with fresh strawberries comprising the red stripes and blueberries making up the blue field behind the stars.
Music followed dinner as surely as games of horseshoes and bocce preceded it. Uncles on mandolin or piano sang old Italian folk songs or Italian versions of bygone American ditties, like “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” These, along with a few American classics like “Yankee Doodle” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” created the perfect accompaniment to three generations bound by Italian traditions who’d come together to celebrate the quintessential American holiday.
As more and more of the first-generation immigrants passed away, the Fourth of July seemed to become less and less important. We still celebrated it, but certainly not in the numbers or with the same passion we once had. As my generation reached early adulthood, we began to form our own political opinions, which were usually not in keeping with those of many of the older generations, who were rather conservative and still believed that America was the greatest country in the world no matter what. After the horror of the 9/11 attacks, these political differences were exacerbated. For me and some of the more liberal family members, patriotism seemed to have been monopolized by those with hawkish views of how to right that terrible wrong and who waved the American flag more like a weapon than a symbol of freedom, acceptance, and possibility. We were becoming once again a country where immigrants were vilified and disagreeing with the government’s wars in the Middle East was practically tantamount to treason. Ultraconservatives even started calling french fries “Freedom Fries” as well as boycotting and even smashing bottles of French wine because the French refused to send troops to fight alongside the United States in Iraq. I wish they had just sent them to me. Not the troops, the wine. I am hoping now, as I write this, that those days will soon be behind us.