Only after spending time in a place where any and all displays of nationalism are tsked-tsked (unless it is football-related of course) have I really begun to notice that American nationalism is unusually strong and sort of scarily so. I’ve long dismissed the notion that there’s any logic to patriotism and have long acknowledged that the American brand of cultural superiority is a particularly distasteful one. But the contrast is especially stark when you live and witness the difference. For example, there is a road in Worcester, Massachusetts that is lined with flags on both sides of the street for blocks and blocks and blocks. And this is totally normal. This would not be normal anywhere else in the Western world. If it happened in Germany, it would probably be interpreted as frightening.
Anyway, this is all a preamble to a four-day-late re-post of last year’s Independence Day entry:
I spent July 4th in Boston. This was a first. I wanted to go to Nantucket, but Patrick is allergic to crowds and seersucker and pre-planning. It would never do. I suppose you can only get so patriotic when spending the holiday with your English bulldog and German lover (though, to be fair, Hamlet’s ancestry is just a front for his humble Poughkeepsie puppyhood).
So instead, we woke up late, me before him, surprised that the weather improved overnight and irritated that some local talking head would certainly point to this as proof of god’s favoritism. 10:30am soon stretched into 11, and 11 into half-shut eyes, and that into unscheduled copulation. It was noon by the time we left, still groggy and blurry-eyed.
The train to Central Square was empty. Boston generally felt like a ghost town. We spent the first half of our holiday eating outside at Andala Coffee House, where we could still make out the scent of shisha used by the previous night’s patrons. Hamlet sat at our feet, shaded by the table and emerging every so often to sniff at the plates brought out by the waitresses, one of whom got jumpy at the sight of dogs. We transitioned from lunch to work seamlessly. It seemed natural that my MacBook would follow the final course of baklava. I wasn’t particularly interested in my email or my assignments, but I half-heartedly tapped away at my laptop nonetheless in hopes of accomplishing something before I called it a holiday. Patrick read a new book on China (or maybe it was Russia?) and capitalism or communism or some combination of the above. Two hours later, I traded in Steve Jobs for Ian McEwan and decided to redirect my focus to the fascinating internal monologue of a newly married and extremely repressed couple in 1960s Britain.
Soon after, we returned to a deserted Beacon Hill and a mildly warm apartment, where we determined immediately upon entrance that we’d accomplish enough for a Saturday. We live walking distance from the Hatch Shell where the Boston Pops Orchestra plays their annual free concert before the fireworks show. Even if we weren’t interested in camping there overnight for seats, there were still the blocks upon tree-lined blocks of the Esplanade, which extends far beyond the performance space, where we could have stood together, one of us with leash in hand, the other with a camera. Still, neither of us was interested in temporarily setting aside our misanthropy to rub shoulders with the New Brahmin Class or their stroller-bound spawn.
And so, Patrick lugged lawn chairs up five flights of stairs, while I supervised the dog. We watched the slightly terrifying flyover of F-15s from the roof of our building, which offered a perfectly good view of the festivities and none of the annoyance of sharing personal space with the diaper-clad. The lawn chairs, liberated from a neighbor’s balcony, came with holes in the armrest, like imaginary residences for the beer I don’t drink. It was the first night we could sit on the roof without jackets, though the dog still shivered from fright. The fireworks display was longer than expected, an almost distasteful extravagance whose only redemption was that it ended at some point. Every bit as terrified as expected, Hamlet wriggled about in Patrick’s lap. I snuck a kiss, my first with a man under fireworks. We devoured an entire bag of dates during the course of the half-hour show.
I thought the colorful explosions seemed strangely reminiscent of war, perhaps because our position on the roof offered a seldom-seen perspective of smoke rising ominously over the city. Frankly, I sympathized with Hamlet. From a dog’s point of view, it really must’ve appeared like the world was coming to an end. “It looks like someone is bombing the city,” I told Patrick. He said something vague in response, like, “That could be one interpretation.” I took that to mean that I was getting overly political or reading into things. “But don’t you find the parallelism between patriotism and war ironic?” I insisted. “The low-flying fighter jets earlier, the sounds of the fireworks, the smoke over the River? Weren’t you scared?”
No, actually, he wasn’t. Growing up in West Germany, he regularly spotted (and more often, heard) fighter planes conducting military exercises overhead. I’d never seen a F-15 before or ever imagined what it might look like over my house. But he already knew.
“I’m going to tell people that my boyfriend was in the Cold War,” I said to him.
