THAT 4TH OF JULY IN 2006

Today, as we celebrate our nation's independence, I re-post a favorite message which I originally posted July 4, 2006.  Our family's patriotic hero was my Dad, who had passed earlier that year.  My nephew Chris honored my Dad, his grandfather, that day.  Our family had 2 children at that time, and now we have 5... and they are becoming the next generation who will carry the torch to honor their heritage in the years ahead.      

Tomorrow will be the first 4^th of July we will spend without Dad, who was our family’s most ardent patriot. At least I thought he was, until last summer’s visit with my nephew Christopher, his wife Holly, and their son Holden.

Family was always critically important to Dad. He worked in a family business, and as the youngest son and second-youngest sibling, he paid homage at work and afterwards to his parents as well as his siblings, during their lives and even after their deaths.

Patriotism was also key to Dad’s set of values. He flew the flag proudly, brought us to endless parades commemorating wars and wounded or fallen heroes, and teared up when the national anthem was played.

In retrospect, I believe Dad’s patriotism and family loyalty each grew from a feeling of obligation to those who had gone before, made sacrifices, and deserved respect. He passed those feelings of obligation and service to others down to my brother Jack and me, and we in turn have lived lives serving the obligations to which we feel honor-bound.

Yet as I said earlier, it is a singular memory shared with Jack’s son Christopher last summer which has made me believe that, inasmuch as Dad’s family and patriotic values were passed to Jack and me, it is Chris who may have eclipsed us both as Dad’s successor to the descriptor “most patriotic.”

Dad and I drove down to Brooklyn for a weekend with Chris, Holly and Holden last July. After a great dinner at a Lebanese restaurant which Chris had scouted out to impress his grandfather (part of Dad’s family loyalty, of course, emanating from his pride in his Middle-Eastern heritage), we drove through some neighborhoods which Chris biked through by day, ever-interested in the progress of gentrification overtaking and improving Brooklyn. Chris started our tour in the very Brooklyn neighborhood where my Mom and Dad had lived during Dad’s World War II service at Fort Hamilton, NY. – a neighborhood Chris had researched, photographed, and preserved in a wonderful album for his grandfather when he and Holly first moved to Brooklyn. He then proudly recited each ethnicity represented in the dozens of Brooklyn neighborhoods he navigated for us. Intrigued by every thread of the tapestry of diversity which was his Brooklyn, Chris recounted us with tales of going to restaurants, retail shops, and homes within those many neighborhoods to find experiences he could share with Holly and Holden, and now, with his grandfather and me. Dad’s wartime Brooklyn was not Chris’s kaleidoscopic Brooklyn, but had transitioned into what Chris was showing off to his grandfather that special night.

Near the end of our evening together, as his grandfather’s chest was about to burst in pride at the wonderful family man his grandson had turned out to be, Chris took us down an alley which separated a newly-renovated apartment building from the section of the neighborhood not yet upgraded. It was a warm night, and through the opening between the buildings, the familiar Hudson River came into view. As Dad recounted fond memories of shuttling across the Hudson to his military post every day in the mid-1940s, rising out of the river in the distance appeared the Statue of Liberty. Shrouded in steam coming up off the Hudson, she was almost ethereal as she punctuated the lesson Chris had been teaching us the entire evening. As she had welcomed so many from so far, he too embraced the multi-cultural wonder of the borough he called home. His was the patriotism of diversity, of wonder, and of acceptance. He had taken Dad’s love of America and loyalty to family to another dimension. His inclusive description of city life, neighborhood life, and family life, elevated him to the role of keeper of the flame, and Dad acknowledged the transition.

The passages in our lives bring memories into focus, and allow us to welcome and accept time and its necessary changes. As his grandfather relinquished the reins to Chris that warm July night, I knew our family’s Brooklyn heritage would go forward in a new direction. And today, as I look back, that heritage extends to the true meaning of patriotism in a new world – the world on which Chris, his family, and his generation will make their mark.