The Glorious Fourth...

The Fourth of July was the memory of a new republic, a bloody babe of destiny, waiting to be filled with soul.

Ross Lockridge, Jr.                                           
Raintree County                                         
                                                                                             

To look at the sweet corn you wouldn't believe it. Independence Day, 2019, and the corn is yellow and stunted, barely ankle high. Looks like"Knee high by the Fourth of July" will have to wait for the next corn season. I tilled up the first planting which yielded a meagerly dozen sprouts out of two rows. The second planting, while well-sprouted, lacks the robust growth corn usually experiences this time of year. But please excuse the corniness. The subject of this post concerns the 243rd birthday of this our Grand Republic.

This Glorious Fourth, I'll spend like last year's: listening to Sousa marches and the patriotic songs rendered by the forceful chorus of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir from their "Spirit of America" CD. The pyrotechnics I'll leave to the younger, more adventuresome set; those days of crump, crackle, and boom I've left behind, thankfully with all fingers and limbs intact, hearing only slightly diminished. I'll miss, however, the homemade ice cream and butterscotch brownies.

In honor of the day perhaps I should revisit the Declaration of Independence, brush up on the Constitution of the United States, read some of the fine print. Or perhaps a bit of Thomas Paine.... (Seems to me the pamphleteer's messages are currently--and sadly--foreign to the powers that be.)

But no thanks. On this celebratory day I can't think of a more patriotic thing to do than pull my favorite novel from the bookshelf, the only novel this confirmed reader has read twice, flip through the pages to my favorite passages (my copy bristles with sticky notes), and revisit the grand panoply of our Great Republic in the latter half of the 19th Century.

Raintree County is a sprawling novel. And at times a brawling novel. (The manuscript Lockridge delivered to Scribner's publishing weighed twenty pounds.) It covers a tumultuous epoch of our country's history, the britches bustin' period spanning the Clay/Polk presidential election of 1844 to  1892, a half decade that saw the Westward movement and the closing of the frontier, the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, and the transcontinental linking of our infant railroad system, "binding ocean to ocean in bands of steel." The fulcrum of the story line is July Fourth, 1892, and the slate of celebratory events scheduled for the day. The story begins with protagonist Johnny Shawnessy preparing to participate in the festivities. Events of the day trigger flashbacks that skip the story back and forth across five decades of history including seven memorable July Fourths. Though successive chapters might record events decades apart, the ending sentence, each incomplete, is skillfully linked to the beginning sentence of the next. This device, though delightful, makes the novel a challenge to read. Every Glorious Fourth I consider it a patriotic duty to revisit Lockridge's epic novel and thus once again...

happy birthday to our Grand Republic. May it thrive and prevail as a safer...and more to the point, saner beacon for the world.

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