32/4

Thirty-two fourths. A top-heavy fraction? Equals 8? Or a way to say that Gven and I have endured many Independence Days since we met on the bicentennial of the founding of the imperial amerikan nation-state, and did so again. Cue the rockets red glare, bombs bursting in air, our flag is still there.

This time we had people over for a change. We tried to make the house presentable, though rumor has it you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Yet everyone came, they seemed to have a good time, I guess, and a backyard cookout at the Golly household probably reflected our best and our worst.

Gven said the yard looked good, but to my eye it was a mixed bag of dry flowerbeds, developmentally delayed vegetables, and trees that need some serious trimming. The patio itself, scene of the soire, is 12 rows short of a complete reconstruction, so about 80 percent of the brick pavers look nice and uniform, if not quite flat, and the unfinished 20 percent provides a revealing before-and-after contrast. I think the slight undulations add character, don't you?

Our "eclectic" collection of mismatched outdoor furniture was adequate; everyone had a place to sit and eat, drink, talk: one real (circa Clintonville) Adirondack chair, 2 plastic faux (circa Westerville) Adirondack chairs, two old fashioned sleel springback chairs (circa Atlanta), three molded plastic stacking chairs (circa Grandview), and two folding canvas deck chairs fresh from Schiller Park theater duty.

The new ceramic tile and steel table held brots and burger from the old Weber grill (circa Grandview) and wine; beer is in the fridge. In the kitchen you'll find Julie's fruit salad, Linda's broccoli salad, Sue's pasta salad, and of course Kate's cake. I'm forgetting someone's contribution because I'm a poor and forgetful host.

Jim asked about the garden, of course, so we walked back to the southeast corner to check out the volunteer pumpkin (or squash?) vines, the retarded tomatoes and peppers, the finger-sized eggplants, the tall onions going to seed. He reported on the state of his raspberry bushes with typical New England reserve and admired my compost frame.

Michio also admired the compost set-up and, modest to a fault, lamented that he hasn't organized his kitchen around separating compost from trash, paper, metal, plasticm, and glass. I had a book I wanted him to see, a 1935 edition of Wahr's Japanese Dictionary of Physics and Chemistry (really) found at a yard sale some time in the 1970s and still taking up space on a shelf in our workshop. Since Michio is both Japanese and a chemist, I thought I'd finally found somebody to take this monstrous tome off my hands, but he wouldn't take it; he said I should see what I can get for it on eBay.

Gwen personal trainer Sue showed up; Zelda's friend Stephanie was there; Jim and Kate's kids Emma and Tedy came, and so did Linda's son Jason. We talked about some of the little dramas in our lives: what our kids are up to, movies we've seen, what our kids are up to, books we've read, what our kids are up to. Jason had some harrowing adventures at Bonaroo; Tedy is preparing to make the trek to the College of Santa Fe in the fall; Zelda runs into both of Julie's sons at her favorite north campus haunts. "La Vie en Rose" is very good, so I should see it while it's still at the Drexel.

And then there were fireworks, of course, because this is Amerika, and it wouldn't be our nazional independence day without the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air, etc. Someone said they don't like the pre-Fourth "Red White and Boom" extravaganza downtown because of all the white trash who go. Then why are you here? I wondered, but not outloud. The young went to Whetstone, the old went to Methodistville, and the holdouts stayed put on our bourgeois countercultural terra cotta patio to watch fireworks through the pine trees.

Our first fourth together was the bicentennial in Atlanta. I was visiting my sister Jo Jo, helping her move to a house closer to my brother-in-law's psychology practice around the corneer from Emory. Gven was living in midtown, teaching yoga, and working at the office. We had a group-date to the Varsity, an Atlanta fast-food institution near Georgia Tech and downtown. I think we had ice cream and champagne. The next night we had a double-date with some other people and saw a very bad movie. The next night we made a pizza with sliced tomatoes.

Do the math. If 1976 was our first, then 2007 was our thirty-second - if you count 1980, when I was in Adel, Iowa, working at Camp Sunnyside, and she was in Atlanta training with the Light of Yoga Society. There was one in Chicago, one in Oberlin, one in Ithaca-Cortland, several more in Atlanta, including one Peachtree Road Race fiasco, and several in central Swingstate: there have been Doo-Dah Parades in the Short North, the Park of Roses, patriotic Methodistville Rotary Club parades, and even a gray pickup truck disguised as a Yoga Factory "float" idling up State Street.

Happy anniversary.