July 6: ""House," History, Great Experiment

Billy Collins thinks about this old house . . . 

House

by: Billy Collins

I lie in a bedroom of a house

that was built in 1862, we were told--

the two windows still facing east

into the bright daily reveille of the sun.

The early birds are chirping,

and I think of those who have slept here before,

the family we bought the house from--

the five Critchlows--

and the engineer they told us about

who lived here alone before them,

the one who built onto the back

of the house a large glassy room with wood beams.

I have an old photograph of the house

in black and white, a few small trees,

and a curved dirt driveway,

but I do not know who lived here then.

So I go back to the Civil War

and to the farmer who built the house

and the rough stone walls

that encompass the house and run up into the woods,

he who mounted his thin wife in this room,

while the war raged to the south,

with the strength of a dairyman

or with the tenderness of a dairyman

or with both, alternating back and forth

so as to give his wife much pleasure

and to call down a son to earth

to take over the cows and the farm

when he no longer had the strength

after all the days and nights of toil and prayer--

the sun breaking over the same horizon

into these same windows,

lighting the same bed-space where I lie

having nothing to farm, and no son,

the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,

feeling better and worse by turns.

We celebrated Independence Day in my hometown today.  Parade this morning.  Community picnic and fireworks tonight.  I've been going to these events since I was a teenager.  (Translation:  a very, very long time.)  So I spent a good deal of time during the past 14 or 15 hours thinking about time and history.

I love the small town-ness of these celebrations, where you run into people you haven't seen in years, coupled with current friends and acquaintances.  Everyone know everyone else, or at least to whom you're related.

When my dad was alive, he marched with members of the local Elks club every year.  When my daughter was younger, she was on a float with the cheer team from her high school.  I, myself, have paraded many times for theater productions I've directed.  I've walked with roller-skating nuns, farm animals from Charlotte's Web, and an army of Oompa Loompas.  

And the community picnic, with its kettle corn and elephant ears and deep-fried everything, always fills me with nostalgia.  People like to think the times of their youths were simpler, easier.  That everyone got along, and nothing terrible ever happened.  A Lake Wobegon time

Of course, that's a load of crap.  We have institutional racism and political divisions and poverty today.  When I was a kid, I had Ronald Reagan's war on social welfare programs, the AIDS epidemic, and institutional racism (some things never change).  That's my history.  Our histories.  Full of struggle and homophobia and economic disparity.

So, when the fireworks started coloring the heavens tonight, I thought about all these things that fill me with shame for who we are right now.  However, the exploding mushrooms and cascading sparks also reminded me that the United States of America has been a great experiment since the time we defeated the Redcoats.  A grand, messy exercise in freedom.

Saint Marty just hopes we can defeat the red hats this November.