Two Hundred and Fifty Candles

Fifty years ago, I stood on the lawn near the Washington Monument with my Aunt Marilyn and about a hundred thousand strangers, waiting for Up with People to take the stage. I was a young girl. It was July 1976, the country's 200th birthday, and I remember the press of the crowd, the heat, the sense that something enormous was happening and I got to be inside of it.

Here is what I don't remember: fear. Nobody scanned the crowd for exits. Nobody wondered if it was safe to bring a child into a sea of that many people. We just went. We sang. We watched the fireworks bloom over the monument and got back to my aunt's place in the dark, tired and happy.

That's not nostalgia talking, or at least not only nostalgia. The country was far from united in 1976. Vietnam had split families down the middle, and the wounds were still pretty raw. We were divided then too. But somehow, for one night on that lawn, a hundred thousand people who probably disagreed about nearly everything stood shoulder to shoulder and looked up at the same sky.

Today the country turns 250, and I've been thinking about what my family put into it.

Mine is a family heritage of immigrants and of people who were here long before the boats came. My great-great-great grandfather was a fur trader for the U.S. government on the Mississippi River for Ulysses S Grant, and he married three indigenous women over his lifetime. Their blood runs in mine. My people were traders, travelers, survivors of the kind of hard lives that don't make it into textbooks.

Mark's family helped build the country itself. His ancestor William Matlock left England on one of the ships that followed the Mayflower, and the family settled along the Delaware River and made their way down through Virginia, landowners for generations, and never once slaveholders. Stephen Matlock fought and distinguished himself in the Revolutionary War. And Mark's seventh great uncle, Timothy Matlack, was the man trusted to put quill to parchment and inscribe the official Declaration of Independence, the actual document under glass in the National Archives. When you look at that handwriting, you're looking at a Matlack's steady hand.

So, between the two of us, our families have been fur traders and farmers, soldiers and scribes, people who arrived and people who were already here. None of it was easy. Nothing was handed to anyone. Every generation carved out its life with work and stubbornness and gratitude, and then handed the chisel to the next one.

That's the version of patriotism I believe in. Not the loud kind. The kind that shows up in land worked, in children raised, in a name signed carefully at the bottom of something that matters.

I know the country feels divided again. It felt divided in 1976 too, and we still filled that lawn. Division is apparently something America does at regular intervals. What I’m reflecting on is the girl on the grass with her aunt, unafraid, watching the sky light up, certain without being able to say why that she belonged to something worth celebrating.

Tonight, there ware fireworks over Georgia, and Mark and I are watching them from the farm, fifty years and a whole life away from that lawn in Washington. Two hundred and fifty candles on the Nation’s cake.

Aunt Marilyn, I hope you can see the fireworks from heaven.