Sometimes deadlines are not the friends of writers. They fall at inopportune times. Before events actually happen, leaving the writer to hypothesize, to conjecturize, to see the future and try to tell what happens before it actually does.
And that’s what I’m doing this week. Because I desperately want to write about my family’s Fourth of July cookout. But it happened after my column was due. Only … I just can’t wait! I know how it will go. I know how it will turn out. And I think it went something like …
The Fourth of July cookout at my mother’s house. Actually, it’s not a cookout. My wife for years has been saying we should make it a REAL cookout. Make it easy and just grill. My mother does have a grill. Only, it’s NOT for grilling. She uses it for wheeling the cats in their baskets to the car when she has to take them to the vet. Every word of that is the God’s honest truth. She wheels her cats to the car in a grill! You can spend all the time you want trying to make sense of that, but good luck. It will never add up.
Every Fourth of July we go over to my mother’s. It’s just blocks from the fireworks. We take a bunch of food that we cook on our own. It’s the kind of food that will clog your arteries and make you the weight of a granite boulder. The kind of boulder that rolls down mountains and crushes entire villages. I don’t know why we eat like this, but it’s prescribed. I think it says something about this in the Constitution.
We cook this food in air conditioned-comfort. Then we take it to my mother’s and eat outside under the grape vine arbor where it’s so hot that the grapes burst and we wonder why anyone would declare independence in the most wretched month of the year. Like, October wasn’t free?
Then we start to argue. We argue about everything. That it’s so hot and that we’re sitting outside. That a salad isn’t really a salad if it’s bought in a bag. That grills should be used for grilling and not transporting cats. That the Pythagorean theorem and the Dot-com bust were somehow interconnected. I disagree because I don’t know what either of these things are.
This is why my dad decides to come in to town as late as feasibly possible for the Fourth. “It’s not that I don’t want to go to your mother’s house,” he said. “It’s more that my doctor has warned me if my blood pressure spikes that high again, I could be a goner. I mean … she puts cats in a grill and then everyone argues about it!”
This is how we celebrate our nation’s independence. I like to think that this is what our forefathers envisioned. I don’t know how they would feel about cats being wheeled around in grills, but I do like to think they at least wanted to give us the option.