July 4, 2000  Saranac Lake, New York

My grandmother’s name was Pearl, but we kids called her Pell. Pell was very patriotic. As the 4^th of July has approached, I’ve been thinking about Pell, and a soldier boy named Bill Gruber, and the flag.

Pell spent some of her later years in an assisted living center in Muskogee, Oklahoma’s Honor Heights Park, a memorial to those who have fought our wars. There was a flagpole on the sloping lawn below her apartment, and her building was near the VA Hospital. So her later years – all her years actually – were lived in close connection to American heroism.

During World War II when my mother and my brother and I lived at Pell’s house, the family sometimes brought young soldiers home from church for Sunday dinner.  One time my grandfather – we called him Big Daddy – showed up on a Friday evening with Bill, a pimply-faced private he’d found at the bus station. Mother and Pell made the boy a pallet on the floor, and he spent the weekend. Then he got back on the bus and went off to do a grownup soldier’s duty. I guess he had a proper surname – most people do – but none of us seemed to catch it.  He was always ever after referred to as “ol’ Bill Gruber,” for nearby Camp Gruber, where he was stationed.

I’ve wondered from time to time if any of those brave youngsters ever thought – as they went into battle – of the fried chicken and biscuits and iced tea and the unalloyed respect we served there along with the food. Myself – I fully expect recollection of those happy days in that ordinary little house in an ordinary little American town to be among my final thoughts on earth.

At that time, in Muskogee – probably in every small town in the country – you flew the flag on the Fourth of July. It was natural, it was unquestioned, it was like wearing the shiny paper poppies on Memorial Day. You just did it.

Then, in the decades following World War II, the country changed, and flag flying got complicated. It did for me, at least. Old shared truths of American life began to be replaced by turmoil, self-doubt, conflict. We looked up one day, and ol’ Bill Gruber had morphed into a faceless National Guardsman shooting down college students on a campus in Ohio.

Pell remained steadfast in her unquestioning love of the flag right through McCarthyism and political assassinations and Vietnam and all the rest of it. When she was living out her time in the little apartment at Honor Heights, the brightest point in her day was seeing Old Glory raised every morning. (She never called the flag anything but Old Glory.) I was glad she had that bit of certainty and happiness in her life, but I thought she was overlooking some dark truths about our country.

Even now, I find it difficult to sit on the porch of my rich man’s house in Saranac Lake – it’s almost exactly twelve times larger than the one in Muskogee where ol’ Bill Gruber slept on the floor that time – I find it difficult to sit there looking down at Lake Flower and the mountains beyond without thinking of the misery of many of the people living within a few blocks of my Bronx apartment. This old house in the North Country and my blessed life in it is almost unimaginably far removed from that of the poor in New York City, who for whatever reasons live desolate lives of squalor and pain in one of the richest and most civilized cities the earth has ever known.  It’s just not fair.

I figure I get to sit on my porch and feel like a squire in large measure because I’m lucky.  My wife Ann and I worked very hard for this, of course. But before all the work, we were lucky.  We were born into loving families; we were nurtured on life-giving values. Our incremental choices along the way have been mostly good ones, and we’ve never known a day of not being intelligent, ambitious, and hopeful. We received all the bounty of life in this country and none of the burden.

However all that may be, Pell would expect me to fly Old Glory on the Fourth. And so I am. At first light this morning Pell and I marched across my front lawn, invisible drums rolling and a bugle blowing, and we ran Old Glory up to its full thirty-foot height. This afternoon I’m taking four generations of her descendants to the village parade, and in the evening, we’ll watch the fireworks on Lake Flower. Sometime during the day we’re going to gather on the porch for a group photograph. While we’re there, we’ll sing – without reservation – God Bless America.

I guess the way it works is this.  If you’re blessed with Pell for a grandmother, and you saw Bill Gruber off to war, and in addition you get to be a sort of North Country squire, you just have to take time out now and then from questions about fairness and the state of the nation.