Fourth of July Pre-Party..get yer sparklers here.

July 3, 2008

The Fourth is one of my favorite holidays, for many different reasons.

Reason Number One: You don’t HAVE to do anything. No cards, no presents, no turkey, no ham, no freaking colored eggs, no obligations.

Sure, there’s fireworks, but you can watch them from the top of your car if you want, and no one will accuse you of not being in the spirit enough.

Reason Number Two: the explosions. The one day of the year grown men get to light stuff up legally, and my terrified children reap the benefits. (Visually. From an auditory standpoint? Not their thing.) So they wear those ear cover things like you wear on a shooting range. I bought them for concerts, but they come in handy on the Fourth as well.

Reason Number Three: It marks the anniversary of my personal independence day, July 4th, 1994. Step into my time travel machine for a moment.

I was fresh out of high school, graduated in 1992. I went to community college for one year, didn’t do so well. It was a rough time…home wasn’t great, school was really bad, my first baby was stillborn at seven months gestation. My parents were great through that whole horrendous time, but you can bet that when the dust cleared, there was some tension. I was in limbo…not a mom, but not a kid anymore either. My heart was kind of broken, but I also knew that with the really dire health needs this baby would have had, maybe for her it was the best thing.

So I rattled around for a few months. I was obsessed with this coffeehouse in Virginia, called Dharma. I’d drive there every night, an hour away, and sit around drinking coffee till 4 in the morning. I slept on various people’s couches, so as to not disturb my mom. That didn’t do much to help the home sitch. It was all unbearably collegiate and Kerouac-ian in the most laughable sense.

My best friend was also pregnant, (yeah, our high school should have had a program) and was due on July 4th. I promised I would stay until the baby’s birth, but then I was taking off for the Wild West. Some boy at the coffee shop was going to work in Jackson Hole for the summer, and it sounded like as good a place as anywhere else. Better, in fact, as it was new, unscathed by the hurts of home.

When a road trip like that looms in your future, you must get prepared. The things I thought I needed: Canned goods, peanut butter, a big-ass mag-lite for hitting would be attackers as I slept on the side of the road, and CDs. Lots and lots of CDs.

Of course, this is way before I-Tunes, so I had no choice but to actually BUY all of the necessary soundtrack ingredients. After dropping $300 at Sam Goody, I knew I was ready. Here are the ones I remember:

Beastie Boys: Ill Communication and Check your Head
Bob Dylan: Bootleg Sessions
Phish: Rift
Aretha Franklin: Greatest Hits
James Brown: Greatest Hits
Indigo Girls: Swamp Ophelia
Cypress Hill
The The: Dogs of Lust
Fugazi: 13 songs
Best of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong (Stars Fell on Alabama is still my favorite song)
Sarah McLachlan: Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

There were others, but they didn’t make the playlist consistently. I packed my truck, lied to my folks and said a friend was flying home to drive with me, and waited for my god-daughter to get born.

On her birthday, I locked my keys in my truck at the grocery store, as I was getting her mom Ben and Jerry’s. When I came back, she’d arrived via C-section. I saw her in the isolette, and my heart cracked a little wider. Then I did what I never could have, had she been mine. I got in my truck and left.

As I drove that night, I saw fireworks exploding in little towns all down I-70. I was celebrating with them..I would start over, be a cowgirl. Everything would be bright and shiny and new, not dirty and ruined and sad. Somewhere in Ohio, I got tired enough that I curled up in the front seat and fell asleep at a truck stop.

The three days that it took me to drive to Jackson are etched in my brain, deep in my limbic sphere as a time of re-birth. It felt like a small lifetime, lived in a Nissan Pathfinder. The records I listed above are the ones I listened to over and over. Singing along to “Swamp Ophelia” in Iowa, I really started to feel like maybe things would, at some point, be ok. Although “Fare thee well” always made me have to pull over.

And when I wanted to make time, I would crank up “Check Your Head”, with all its swagger and crotch grabbing attitude, or “Cypress Hill”. I was on a mission to finish Tom Robbin’s Jitterbug Perfume before I got there, and to eat chicken fried steak at every truck stop.

What happened when I got there doesn’t really matter…what matters is that I went. I stayed west for a year, and I came back different and same, but ready to rebuild from the ground up. My mom tells a story about a dog they had on the farm that was wounded, and ran away to lie in the mud for a day and came back healed. All these years later, she said to me, “I always thought you needed to go lie in the mud for little bit.” Yep, pretty much.

These days, the Fourth brings family barbecues and fireworks, not wild and crazy road trips. But you can bet at some point, I’m going to steal a minute and go listen to Ill Communication straight thru.

What’s your required road trip music?

And if you’re bored with all your holiday downtime, check out Holiday-themed Why I live at the PO: By Eudora Welty.
My favorite short story EVAH. It is so freaking funny.

xoxox,
L

Posted in Old School