'The Dandelions of Light Now Go to Seed'

“Given the kinds and numbers of problems our country has faced and flubbed over the last decade or two, one might think that the forthcoming jubilee would be subdued, retrospective, elegiac, maybe even prayerful. Given our native bumptiousness and ebullition, though, one might be certain that the party would be big, noisy, brash, and pointless.” 

L.E. Sissman is writing in anticipation of the big one, our country’s much-ballyhooed 200^th birthday. The title of his essay gives it away: “The Bicentennial B.S.” That comes close to summing up my sentiments at the time, though my memory associates July 4, 1976, with a less momentous event, one of my closest of close encounters with law enforcement. I have a flicker of memory: I’m on the roof of an apartment complex garage in Youngstown, Ohio, throwing M-80’s into the neighbors’ yard. I had never done such a thing before and never did it again, but that’s what alcohol can do – turn you into another, less ingratiating person and release your inner asshole. I was twenty-three. Apparently a couple of cops talked to me and, thankfully, I wasn’t belligerent. They let me go, probably with a warning. The last thing I need after forty-five years is a criminal record.

 

I remember none of that. It always comes to mind when I recall Tom Wolfe’s phrase: “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours.” That was me, briefly, and our country. One of the books I was reading at the time was prophetic: the novel Disturbing the Peace (1975) by Richard Yates, the story of an alcoholic bouncing between psych wards and rehabs.

 

When we were kids, the Fourth of July signaled the symbolic mid-point of summer. Two months to go but it was all downhill until we were back in school. My family camped and fished at a private lake owned by a police organization. That is, most of the kids did. The grownups played poker on picnic tables and drank impressive quantities of beer. Most of the men were cops. My father was an auxiliary policeman. On the night of July 4^th, they broke out the illegal fireworks and other pyrotechnics they had seized in the line of duty. That’s how I got every bicycle I ever owned. I still like a good 4^th of July fireworks display, from a distance, but I haven’t thrown an M-80 or other explosive in forty-five years.

 

You’ll find Sissman’s essay in Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s (1975). He died of cancer eight months after the Bicentennial. In his first book of poems, Dying: An Introduction (1968), is a six-page, eight-part poem titled “The Marschallin, Joy Street, July 3, 1949. It’s a portrait of Mona Mountjoy, a lonely, aging Boston matron. She watches the Fourth of July fireworks from her window:

 

“A small white integer appears,

Bears a huge school of yellow pollywogs,

And, with a white wink, vanishes. The boom

Takes twenty-seven seconds to arrive.”

 

Soon, the display dies down:

 

“The last man-made stars burn

Out in the west, the last spectacular

Dwindles to darkness in the captured fort.

The dandelions of light now go to seed.”