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Happy 9th of July! These days of sticky heat and national alarm have been churning up all kinds of fancies. I’ve felt my biannual desire to cocoon myself in a hammock and an urgent fascination with Kristin Cavallari. I’ve been eating green grapes to bookend most meals and letting cars merge ahead of me on crowded highways. Each night, I’ve crawled into bed and mentally referred to it as my “nest.” It’s hard to account for so much summer whimsy!
I spent the actual July 4th holiday with some spirited 8-year-old cousins. They charmed me with their bulbous goggles and love of charcuterie. One of them braided my hair over and over in the favorite style of 2013 YouTube “beauty gurus,” the fishtail braid.
During the braiding, I sat awash in visceral calm, even when my cousin chastised me for squirming (“Stay still, Paddington!”). I liked this new nickname and its association with the iconic Peruvian bear. I recalled my own third-grade ambition to master many braids –– the fishtail, the French, never quite the Dutch. It was all part of a greater transformation: training my clumsy child hands to be dexterous.
Over the weekend, I discussed patriotism with a friend who’d come to visit. She said she never felt more patriotic than when visiting the U.S.’s National Parks. The Everglades, she told me, was the first park to be protected not for its exceptional beauty but for being under threat. Somehow this reminded me of my dad’s and my favorite moment in Little Women –– when Jo March comes home having chopped off her hair to send money to her father in a Civil War hospital. Amy March’s lament –– “Jo, your one beauty!” –– is an inspiration to subversive little sisters everywhere.
The National Parks and Louisa May Alcott are key threads in the American tapestry. So too are American Girl dolls, which my friend and I also discussed at length. I was surprised at my command of the dolls’ many storylines; they were girls like you and me but also participants in major historical reckonings. They came with books detailing their lives, which were adapted into films starring notable child actors (Shailene Woodley as Revolutionary Horse Girl Felicity Merriman, AnnaSophia Robb as Rich Victorian Orphan Samantha Parkington.)
These tales were no doubt ahistorical and sanitized, plus reductive and white-washed. Still, they alerted me to tarring and feathering and air raids and the colonization of New Mexico. Unlike Barbies, American Girls had thick baby wrists and soft, sturdy midsections. Josefina Montoya (of 1824 Santa Fe) had long black tresses that were useful in my own study of French braiding.
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Throughout the holiday weekend, I listened to “Delta Dawn” by Tanya Tucker, a song that almost immediately worms its way into one’s head. My brother and I roamed the house endlessly crooning the question: “Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on?” Later, he showed me a commercial for SEC college football that plays the song over drone shots of different Southern stadiums. The video’s YouTube comments were a sea of earnest tributes, like a 25-year-old forklift operator “proudly shedding tears on [his] lunch break.”
I have a hunch that patriotism has to do with the things that can make you cry. For me it might not be college football, but if I think long enough about the Everglades or about my American Girl dolls sleeping in a storage bin or about all the mornings my mom braided my hair before school, I could get some tears flowing. I wonder what kind of person this makes me –– what kind of patriot.
I’m easily moved by lots of things, like people being attentive to each other. Yesterday at the grocery store, one man stocking shelves said to another (in a tone that suggested he’d wanted to say it for a while): “Man, what’s your name? I feel bad calling you Big Guy.” And if that doesn’t make you feel tender, then I don’t know what will.