i'm currently too tired to think of a fancy title

(for Bloomsbury):

2007 was the first year that I can remember in my then-twenty-five-year-long life that I didn’t attend a fourth of July picnic at my grandma and grandpa’s house.

My grandparents live in the small town of Massillon, Ohio, just a few miles from my parents’ house, the house I grew up in in Canton, Ohio. The rest of my family a generation or two in either direction lives, at the most, about fifty miles away with the notable exception of myself, since I live about two thousand miles away (and am never allowed to forget it by my extended family at any gathering). My family, as far as my own experience goes at least, is extremely antisocial when it comes to just random visits and staying in touch with one another, but at the same time we are fiercely insistent and traditional about holiday family gatherings. Along with Christmas and Thanksgiving, the fourth of July is probably the third-most insisted-upon family function of the year.

Every year since I can remember we have all come together at my grandparents’ house. The menu is always the same, the living room and the picnic area in the backyard is always laid out the same…it’s sort of comforting in a strange way, though it also seems borderline neurotic now that I’m considering it objectively. My grandma always makes the same red-white-and-blue Jello dessert, which I had a major love affair with when I was between the ages of about nine and twelve. The grownups always spend the afternoon sitting in a semicircle of chairs on the lawn, talking about whatever it is grownups talk about (even though I’m almost twenty-seven now I still don’t know what grownups talk about), while the kids (and me) play all sort of various games involving balls and sticks and yelling. Occasionally the grownups will get out their ancient, actually-traditional Bocce ball set, and we’ll end up playing that until it gets too dark to see. Then the sparklers come out, and the kids (and me) spend awhile writing our names in the dark, waiting for the fireworks to start. Nobody on my grandparents’ street have bona fide fireworks of their own: for one, it’s illegal to set them off and the houses are packed too close together for something that potentially dangerous anyway. Fortunately, the city has their own fireworks display (or used to, as of this year, but that’s a story for another day).

This fireworks display comes with an onslaught of patriotic music and people honking their pickup-truck horns in the streets, but this display had become so ingrained in my head as tradition by the time I got old enough to be jaded towards it that it never occurred to me that I could be jaded towards it. It was pretty much the perfect summer picnic activity; all it was missing was a pool.

So last year it was somewhat surreal to find myself in Boston on July fourth, sitting on a sandbar that was in the process of being swallowed by the ocean, surrounded by hundreds of people that I didn’t know and four people that I did, with no grandparents or tricolor dessert in sight. My parents and my brother and his then-girlfriend took a summer vacation last year to the east coast, and I decided to come along, after realizing that my alternative plan of “staying home and working” would probably really become “staying home and doing nothing and being bored senseless”. So on July fourth we were sitting on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, gearing up for the best fireworks display the original thirteen colonies could offer. This particular display had drawn such a crowd – both locals and tourists like us – that we had needed to park close to two miles away and walk to the beach.

It was odd being away from home for the fireworks, stranger still knowing that the party was still going on at my grandparents’ sans my immediate family, but the beach, the fireworks, the incredibly sunset and the surprising camaraderie shown by fellow beachgoers that we had never even met before made the experience more than a fitting replacement.