Now Wait a Bicentennial Minute!

Happy summer! We’ve passed the solstice so I hope you’re enjoying the late sunsets. The problem with living where we do—the bottom 2 floors of a six-flat townhouse on a tree-lined street with other tall townhouses across the street-is that we don’t see the horizon. Except for a teeny sliver between buildings across the way. So it’s twilight here around 6 PM, no matter the time of the year. One of the things I told my husband is that we need to go out more in the evening this summer, just so we can enjoy these long days.

Except, I can’t get out more this summer. Because I have a stress fracture in a weird bone - the talar bone - in my ankle, a bone that takes longer to heal, and now I’m in a boot for at least 6 weeks.

This is really bumming me out.

On Mother’s Day my husband and I were walking to a garden center and I tripped on a broken piece of sidewalk. (Thanks, Chicago!) I fell heavily on my left side. I had bruises all over my leg, a black eye, bruised fingers and a knee the size of a grapefruit. Fortunately everything healed, but the knee took about 4 weeks before it had full range of motion again. During this time, I couldn’t go on my long daily walks very often.

Now, my daily walks are key to my mental health. I have to feel connected to my surroundings; I need to see what new businesses are opening up, which ones have closed, who painted their garage door green, etc.

So, I couldn’t walk as I usually do for a lot of May and I was a little depressed. Then I was able to—and I was off! Really walking, stretching out, my brain said, “Ahhh,” my mood improved. But about 4 weeks ago I started feeling an ache in my right foot. Like a little kink. I thought I could stretch and walk it out, and for about two weeks, I did; it was just an occasional dull ache. But then I had two back-to-back long walks followed by an evening in heels. That night the foot was swollen and more painful than achy.

And so, after many doctor visits and imaging, I am now the sad owner of a stress fracture (likely not related to the earlier fall). And once again, I can’t walk for any great length of time.

This sucks. Really sucks.

This is going to be the summer that wasn’t, for me. I’m still trying to figure out how much I have to be off it, if I can use a knee scooter, etc. Yesterday I signed books at the American Library Association Annual Conference, which took place at McCormick Place, the huge convention complex in Chicago. I hobbled around, stubbornly refused to use a scooter, and yes, my foot did hurt. A lot.

So. That’s where I am as we head into the Fourth of July weekend. I have books to read for research, so that’s good. I just started Andrew Sean Greer’s “Villa Coco,” and I’m having a little trouble getting into it. But I shall persevere!

It’s too hot to spend much time outside this week, so I’m not missing much there. But I also have time to think. (Always a tricky thing for me. Danger, Will Robinson!)

I was thinking about this year, the 250th birthday of our nation. And I couldn’t help but compare it to 1976, the Bicentennial. I was thirteen then. I remember it all vividly. We had block parties galore! Tall ships in New York harbor! Patriotic TV specials and especially—my favorite—Bicentennial Minutes.

Do you remember those?

For the kids, this was back when there were only three important TV networks. CBS was kind of the crown jewel of those three; Walter Cronkite on the CBS Nightly News was the voice and conscience of our nation. (Times, as they say, have changed.)

And on CBS, throughout the evening programming, there were these minute-long educational segments, hosted by various celebrities, talking about what happened on this day 200 years ago. Basically, a day-by-day blow of events that led to the American Revolution, and beyond. To my surprise, my research shows that they began on July 4, 1974, and continued through the end of 1976. I thought they were only on during 1976.

Now, being the history nerd I was even then, I loved them. Although of course, in hindsight, these were white-washed historical tidbits. In the 1970s, history was still being told through a very narrow, gender-and-race specific lens. I guess it still is, though. Sigh.

But you’d have people like Darren McGavin talking about the blockade of the New York Harbor on April 2, 1776.

Or Jessica Tandy, on August 31, 1975, telling how the Boston’s Liberty Tree was cut down.

And at the end of each one, the narrator would close with a version of Walter Cronkite’s famous sign off—“And that’s the way it was.”

There was just such a celebration of our history, back in 1976. That’s what the Bicentennial was, back then—we honored the past. Again, we—regretfully—didn’t talk about our country’s many failings, like genocide and enslavement and a shoddy Civil Rights record. Every country has these failings. We’re not different.

We can still talk about history, can still celebrate the good things while acknowledging the bad. But my point is—in 1976, we looked backward. And inward. We reflected. We celebrated, yes—we celebrated a noble experiment. One that still hasn’t succeeded, but at least in 1976, so soon after Nixon resigned after Watergate but somehow, the country didn’t fall apart and the bad guys didn’t win, we felt that it probably would.

So. 2026. What’s going on?

If you’d asked me back when I was thirteen—and I was such an earnest thirteen-year-old! I remember journaling all my feelings about the Bicentennial, writing everything down for posterity (of course, I have no idea where that journal is now)—I would have said that 2026 would be much the same. Celebrating a country, a past, a shared history, flaws and all.

That is not what I see being celebrated by those in high places today. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

I also don’t feel a celebratory mood in the country at all. Not much unites us right now. Nobody attempted anything like a Bicentennial Minute to try to get us all to look at the past together. Who’s talking about the Founding Fathers and Mothers right now? Who’s remembering the triumph and failure of the Declaration of Independence? For it did fail in many ways, but as a document to create a nation out of an idea, it was pretty darn good. It just failed to declare independence and freedom for every single soul in this nation. And we are still struggling with that.

And I would like us to have conversations about it, as a nation. As we look back on 250 years of this noble experiment. I would like us all to be excited about the tall ships in the harbor and about fireworks and the Boston Pops—remember Arthur Fiedler?—playing patriotic music, and for individuals to put aside their complexes and egos and remember that none of this is about them.

None of it.

But—

That’s not happening. And so we go into this holiday weekend in a very different mood than we were in in 1976. And in so much more ignorance than we were then, too.

All for the lack of a Bicentennial—or actually, Semiquincentennial—Minute.