THE BELL CURVE:A time to celebrate, reflect

I’m writing this as I pack up to fly to North Carolina to celebrate my birthday and Independence Day — in that order — with dear friends who live in a rich and greening forest a few miles from the bucolic town of Brevard. It will be, in every sense, an old-fashioned Fourth of July.

There will be a band concert of mostly Sousa music, aided and abetted by musicians from nearby Brevard College and the cannon fire that accompanies Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” There will be a street fair replete with stands selling wonderfully fattening foods and a patriotic parade of bicycles and fire engines. There will be a magnificent home-cooked dinner of deep-fried chicken and muscular gravy to smother the mashed potatoes and a subversive firing after dark of a handful of modest fireworks picked up across the border in South Carolina.

And it will end in the semi-darkness of a screened porch resting in tree tops where the day will meld into quiet memories of Independence Days many years earlier in the equally bucolic town of Decatur, Ind.

In a precarious memory box that has sifted out most of the negatives, these memories are both warm and vivid. In the Great Depression years of my youth, the keynote of the Fourth of July was always patriotism, and the centerpiece was my Uncle French, who gave the same speech every year from the bandstand of a local park that overlooked the cemetery where both sets of my grandparents were buried. His speech was called “Our Flag” and it had been printed out and given to us from year to year so we had it virtually memorized. My uncle had not served in World War I — I didn’t know the reasons and never asked — but he could wring every shred of patriotic emotion from his flag speech, and I can still feel its mellifluous tone that grabbed me more than the words.

In those days, dinner was also fried chicken, but it came in a picnic basket whose generous contents we spread out on a park table before listening — sort of — to the speech and a concert delivered by the high school band. Then there was a parade, of sorts, through the downtown streets, led by veterans of the first World War and — for at least one year I can remember — a solitary veteran of the Civil War, a drummer boy who outlived all his companions and must have been pushing a hundred years. I think of him more often — hobbling along proudly unaided — as the World War II vets disappear in growing numbers.

My hosts in North Carolina are Clifford and Rae Hicks, out of Marshalltown, Iowa. Clifford shared a war with me, but in a violent and bloody setting I could only imagine from my place in the sky. As a Marine infantry captain, he led two island assaults, at Bougainville and Guam, and watched good friends die at his side. Only in recent years has he been able to talk about those experiences, with the help of a few martinis in the dusk of a summer night on the Hicks’ porch.

The bond this war experience — however different — creates is powerful, especially between people who share a Midwestern upbringing, hold similar political and social views, and would have bonded had there been no war.

Cliff and Rae Hicks are quintessential Midwesterners, if there is such a thing — and I believe firmly there is. The fact that a ton of us landed in California after World War II speaks more to the climate than the ambience. We got a jolt of California on our way overseas, and many thousands of us spent the early post-war years figuring out how to get back. But not the Hicks family. So naturally, it makes sense for me to spend my birthday in North Carolina.

Having a birthday on a national holiday as significant as July 4 makes it hard to overlook. This results in more than normal once-a-year cards from people I don’t want to lose touch with, and that’s all to the good. But on the flip side is the reminder I can’t avoid that the years tend to keep compounding themselves relentlessly and the days pass with distressing speed. The answer, of course, is to make the best of each one.

Some years ago, I made the brash promise that I would never leave this life until the Angels won a World Series. At the time, that seemed the least likely event that could possibly happen. Then the Angels did it, and amid my joy was the realization I had foolishly made myself vulnerable. So this time I’ve chosen a sure thing: I’m going to be around until Dick Cheney smiles publicly.

Meanwhile, I’ll tip my first martini on this Fourth of July to California from the hills of North Carolina.