All Come to Look for America

A family portrait, fifty years apart

Family portrait. July 3, 1976.

Mom stands bracing herself against the door frame with one outstretched arm. She leans halfway between the garage and the Bar Room, hunched protectively over her big, basketball belly as she calls out, “Doug! Come on!”

Mom’s baby is coming. And by the way she’s panting, tears in her eyes, it seems the baby doesn’t want to wait.

Dad comes rushing into the room carrying a paper grocery bag, one of Mom’s shirts poking out the top. He’s grabbed a long-sleeve shirt. She’ll hate that. I run to Mom and Dad’s room and grab one of her wispy, cool summer tops. I stuff it into the bag and Dad shoots me a quick nod of acknowledgement.

Dad gets mom situated in his El Camino and they hurry out of the driveway, tires spewing bits of gravel across the asphalt. I stare out the huge picture windows into the bright July day and wonder if all the commotion has woken Scott. But I peer into his room and find him still asleep, one arm flung over the blue teddy bear Gramps got him at the church bazaar. I have a matching pink one.

Will we have need for another pink bear, or will it be a blue one? I’m hoping for a sister, but I suppose another brother is OK, too.

I pace around the Bar Room for a moment. The space that serves as our family room has an enormous bar along the north wall that we never use. Sometimes, Scott and I sit on the swivel stools, spin until we’re dizzy, then try to walk across the room without careening into the furniture.

I go to the phone hanging by the bar. My mission: call Grandma. I dial the number I’ve known by heart since I was five. Grandma and Gramps live just 10 minutes away.

Gramps answers. I breathlessly tell him my news, and I hear him call, “Sylvia, the baby!” Scott and I pack our things, and before we’re even finished Gramps drops Grandma off. For some reason, she’s been tasked with driving Mom’s Chevy Vega to the hospital. As an adult, I’ll wonder whether that was so Dad didn’t have to concern himself with driving my Mom and the baby home.

When Grandma attempts to back out of our garage, she forgets to close her door. It catches on the garage frame and tears part of the molding away. The car door is bent too far forward, but Grandma manages to close it while muttering, “Shoot! Gosh darn it anyway!” It will creak loudly and never close right again.

That night, Mom will stand at the third floor hospital window alone, holding our new baby brother, Dustin, watching fireworks. Normally, we’d be seated in a blanket on the grass beside her while she whooped and cheered, the reflections of colored sparks glimmering in her eyes.

But on this July 4th, when America turns 200, Mom is in the hospital and can’t be part of the celebration. So Gramps takes us to the bicentennial parade downtown. He stands erect, his barrel-shaped chest puffed with pride, saluting the flag as the color guard passes. He cheers at the high school band and tells me they get better every year, although I can’t hear a difference.

I gaze up at Gramps, my favorite person in the world besides Mom. His delight at watching this grand parade makes me delighted, too. I reach for his hand, and he smiles down at me. On Gramps’s other side, Scott fidgets and slurps a Bomb Pop, the red and blue dye painting his lips and chin. He stares, smiling and rapt, at the passing band, waving a little American flag on a stick.

* * * *

Family portrait. Friday, June 26, 2026.

I sit in the recliner with a knee scooter beside me and my casted right leg elevated, five weeks along in my recovery with a broken fibula and high ankle sprain.

Blam!

The sound comes from just outside the open window. I jump. Dodger, my scruffy black cattle dog mix, jumps too, then looks at me with ears pinned back, concerned eyes seeking my own: What was that?

“Idiots,” I mutter. “It’s all good, Dodge.”

My dog lies back on his bed, releasing the kind of groan only a canine who lives in a comfortable space with daily meal service, but pays no rent, can utter. Meanwhile, I wonder whether I should give him some trazodone to curb his anxiety in case the neighbors really decide to light things up.

Each year, my neighborhood sounds like a war zone. This year, the guys up the street—who seem to compete annually for Supreme Amateur Pyrotechnician of the Year—are apparently starting early to get a jump on the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration.

I can’t feel joy over any of it.

Once, I thrilled to fireworks displays with Mom at my side. Now, Mom’s been gone for 13 years already. I glare at the window wondering when the next blast will startle me and my dog and potentially spark a grass fire. Or worse.

From in their room, my daughter texts me:

The neighbors are getting an early start

We’re both fed up with fireworks. Not only do they annoy us and scare the dogs, but they don’t exactly feel earned these days.

I sit in the recliner. No place else to go. I’m braced for another explosion, so I try to relax my shoulders, if only to keep Dodger from noticing how tense I am.

Blam! Boom!

Really? What are they celebrating? It’s not even July yet. And even if it were…

Much has changed since that day we watched the July 4th parade with Gramps.

Scott moved to Colorado as a young adult. We led separate lives and connected rarely. Even when Scott came home for visits, he spent most of his time with friends rather than family. Once we were separated by our grandfather, standing on either side of him as we watched a patriotic display. Now, we’re separated not only by miles but by ideologies.

I awkwardly reposition my casted leg. I’m beyond mourning the beautiful summer days I’m missing in this damn thing, but that doesn’t mean I’m comfortable. I think back to that day in September when everything went wrong.

Charlie Kirk had been assassinated. Stacy, Scott’s wife, who always referred to me as “lovely Karen,” was outraged. I commented on her Facebook post, urging people to wait for facts before feeding the flames.

It wasn’t what she needed.

In the present, another firework explodes, this one more distant as other neighborhoods join this Friday night precursor to the July 4th weekend. A 50 pound cryptid of a dog climbs into my lap, eyes wary.

I realize the mistake I made with Stacy. She didn’t want to be preached to; she wanted to be angry. Had a political figure I cared about been assassinated, I would have been angry, too.

Maybe I could have prevented what happened next. Or maybe it was always inevitable.

Scott texted, telling me to leave Stacy alone, to stop posting on her Facebook timeline. A cold, wormy knot unspooled in my stomach. Scott and I spoke only on birthdays and holidays, and now he was texting me out of the blue to admonish me?

I answered that I’d been encouraging people to wait for more information, to resist the urge to add to the turmoil. It was nothing personal, just a wish for calmer heads to prevail.

I always blamed the other side, my brother said. And now I was implying that his wife was a bad person. But that couldn’t be right—I loved Stacy! And if Scott knew me at all, he’d have known I wasn’t loyal to parties, just principles.

I closed my eyes to compose myself. I thought of my big-hearted daughter, Ra, trying to bond with her uncle over their shared love of archery but eventually giving up, convinced Scott’s unenthusiastic response meant he didn’t care.

“It’s not that he doesn’t like you,” I’d said. “He’s your uncle. He just doesn’t get you.”

My child. Why couldn’t Scott see what I saw?

It was time to tell the truth I’d been holding close for decades.

I texted back that I couldn’t understand Scott’s support for leaders who opposed everything my daughter represented. How could he champion political figures who wanted to take rights away from LGBTQ people?

Scott insisted that all Kirk ever did was welcome debate.

My fingers flew across the phone keyboard, hands trembling:

“I’m asking whether you believe in human rights because your political beliefs suggest otherwise. Answer this: Is it OK to assume that some people don’t deserve the same rights you do?”

Scott immediately answered that, technically, by asking about rights, I was saying what happened to Kirk was OK.

We ended the exchange in agreement: We no longer had anything to say to one another.

* * * *

I decide to drown out the continuing sporadic fireworks with music. Music always soothes. I get into bed and lie in the dark, headphones on, staring at the ceiling with my broken ankle elevated above my heart.

I think of Scott standing on that sidewalk in 1976, happy, sticky, waving his little American flag.

I think of us riding bikes together. Building blanket forts. Scouring the forest floor for animal tracks, pretending we knew what each one was.

I remember Scott’s 18th birthday party. I worked in a music store and hired my coworker’s band to play a barn party. Someone brought a keg. Then another. My parents’ farm flooded with partygoers, many of them underage. Legend has it that the cops showed up, surveyed the chaos, and then returned when they were off duty to join in.

I didn’t drink. Hated beer. Wasn’t much for parties, either. But I’d wanted to give my brother a big celebration for his 18th. Because I could.

But now, I can’t keep making room in my life for someone who couldn’t answer the simplest, cleanest question I knew how to ask. Something I’d believed we couldn’t possibly disagree on.

My playlist scrolls to the next song, and Paul Simon’s plaintive voice fills my ears:

Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our futures together

The music soothes as Kathy identifies the man in the gabardine suit as a spy, and later drifts off to sleep. Paul confesses to his sleeping travel companion, “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.”

The moon rises over an open field.

Empty and aching. Lost. I close my eyes as the verse continues, then the chorus swells:

All come to look for America…

The line repeats with growing urgency, strings soaring, cymbals crashing, until the organ waltzes us into reverie, a quiet longing for what used to be, or what never really was.

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