What does the Fourth mean to you?

I’ve got my days all mixed up, and I know that Thursday is my cooking blog day, but I guess it will have to wait until tomorrow, because the Fourth is on my mind. I hope you’re celebrating with hamburgers and hot dogs and potato salad and sparklers for the kids (okay, I know they’re dangerous, but we always had them when I was young). I hope you’re not doing a private firework show where someone could get hurt. Read something this morning that said by tonight, a certain number of people would no longer have ten fingers. Please be safe.

Sophie and I are spending the day home alone, me working and she mostly sleeping though right now she’s chewing on a treat. Fireworks don’t much bother her as much as thunder doe—we listen every night to the sounds from the Concerts in the Garden, and I leave the French doors open specifically to hear them. Okay, also to get the evening breeze. Nice cool day here today, wit a high of only 92.

I experimented tonight and made myself some spring pea soup. Got it too thick, so will add more chicken broth and then top it with a dollop of Greek yogurt. That and a big salad will be my dinner.

I don’t need a celebration tonight, because I had an elegant dinner last night with three good friends. Three of us have June and July birthdays, and so we were celebrating. Had dinner at Trinity Terrace—for non-local folks, that’s an upscale, high-rise retirement complex. We dined in the “fancy’ restaurant in the newest tower, and I had Caesar salad, lobster thermidor with scallops, and flourless chocolate cake. So good, so rich. And so good to catch up with the others.

Today I wrote almost my requisite thousand words, fiddled some, read some, napped—a nice quiet holiday. But a part of my mind is on Fourth of July celebrations and the huge elephant in our national room—the ostentatious trump military parade. My neighborhood had a parade, with kids in costume and decked-out trikes and bikes, even strollers and wagons. Mounted police escorted the marchers, and neighbors lined the streets, sitting on front steps and lawn chairs and curbs, waving American flags.. The parade ended at the elementary school with refreshments for all. That’s what the Fourth should be about.

Erma Bombeck, beloved comedic writer, said it best of all years ago: “You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness.  You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.”

It is not about a parade of military might. As the Navy Seal who brought down Osama Bin Laden said, “That’s third world stuff.” It is indeed what military dictators do in countries like Russia and North Korea. I haven’t yet figured out why France seems obliged to have a military parade—seems out of character.

In our country such a parade is another desperate gesture, albeit on a large scale, by a wannabe dictator who is a draft-dodger and is uncertain, to the point of desperation, about his own masculinity. The funniest gifs I saw showed trump riding a tank with a limp cannon. And he displayed his ignorance of all things military by claiming the parade would showcase the latest Sherman tanks. Sherman tanks went out of use in the 1950s.

Cadet Bone Spurs once again did not think of consequences, such as the havoc tanks would create on streets and, God forbid, the mall. Nor did he ever acknowledge the gosh-awful mess his follows left in Orlando after the rally when he announced he will run for a second term (heaven help us1). I dread seeing the desecration of the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow.

It isn’t the worst thing trump has done—one is hard put to choose that worst, though I would probably cite the concentration camps—but this parade was surely another big log on the egotistical bonfire that could destroy America.

God bless thunderstorms! May they rage long and hard in D.C. tonight.