Our July 4 was low on bombast and high on fraternity this year. There were no stealth-bomber flyovers, no tanks treading ominously down Main Street or any other minatory displays of military hardware straight out of a Soviet-era Moscow May Day. Even Lee Greenwood left us alone. I’m told Washington was another story.
For the first time since Covid, “Picnic in the Park” was back in Batavia. This much-loved festival of food, music, and smiling, “hey, how ya doin’?” encounters fills the bosky park across the street from the New York State School for the Blind. (One of Batavia’s many ironies is that the best view in town is from the blind school.)
For years, my wife, daughter and I manned the Landmark Society’s strawberry shortcake stand at Picnic in the Park. We always sold out, and Batavia’s grande dame of preservation, Catherine Roth, annually chided our daughter in her DAR accent: “Too many strawberries!” Gretel cheerfully ignored Mrs. Roth and kept ladling out an extra dollop to the satisfied and sated customers. Each Picnic in the Park morning began with a curious ritual of dueling Americas. A county health department official strolled from booth to booth, checking for compliance with the demands of the regulatory regime. He asked, in a friendly voice, if our hundreds of biscuits had been baked in government-sanctioned institutional kitchens rather than in the outlaw ovens of Landmark Society members. “Sure, sure,” he was assured. Heh-heh. On this day ostensibly dedicated to recalling our “freedoms,” the score was Defiance 1, Abject Compliance 0.
There was no strawberry shortcake stand this year, but we did glimpse what a world shorn of politics looks like. It’s “peaceable kingdom” territory, right out of the American folk artist Edward Hicks.
First person I saw at Picnic in the Park was my friend Richard, an old hippie, the former chairman of our very small local Green party in a county that goes two-and-a-half to one for Donald Trump. Richard ran for library trustee a few months back, while a US flag flew upside down on his porch in protest at the war on Iran. Richard won the election easily – because people really know him. He is a neighbor. Organizer of the community garden. Buyer of coffee and donuts at the historical society’s lectures. Season ticket holder to Muckdogs baseball games. The upside-down flag-flying is just one feature in a rich, full picture.
Richard was talking to a friend, a wonderful woman of a more conservative and religious bent, and they were enjoying each other’s company. Who gives a damn how a friend casts his or her meaningless vote?
The venerable community concert band was playing patriotic airs on the Fourth, the only day of the year we all listen to John Philip Sousa. Then an excellent local Fleetwood Mac tribute band took the stage, and it seemed strikingly apt for Independence Day. After all, it took the infusion of the combustible couple of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham – both American – to juice up what had been just another boring English blues band. (Sorry, Peter Green fans.)
One of Batavia’s many ironies is that the best view in town is from the blind school
Every July 4, whether at Picnic in the Park or the nearby Genesee Country Village and Museum, my late friend Barber Conable, for 20 years a paragon of statesmanship as our member of Congress, used to read the Declaration of Independence, with stentorian voice and actorly flourishes. For most Congress-dwellers this would be an annoying distraction from dunning donors for dollars. Puzzling, too: what’s all this talk about revolution and secession? Should we alert the Department of Homeland Security? See something, say something!
But the day meant something to Conable. One of his ancestors, Thomas Crafts, was a “True Born Son of Liberty” and both a participant in, and a supplier of the Mohawk dress for, the Boston Tea Party.
Conable was by no means opposed to hot dogs and fireworks, and he was a politician – but his capacity for friendship and his understanding that political differences must not poison personal relationships mark him as occupying another universe from both the Fox-crazed and the Trump-deranged who make the current scene so unpleasant.
One of the wisest if most heartbreaking questions posed in the dying years of the 20th century came from the erratic motorist Rodney King’s “Can we all get along?” True, “Can’t we all just get along?” reads better, but Rodney had the right idea. And you know… really we can.
Comments