I was never all that fond of the 4th of July. When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, there wasn’t a big parade or fireworks show in our town. Most people just seized the opportunity to take to the streets and shoot off whatever fireworks they had bought themselves (including the really loud, really illegal kind you get by driving down to Tiajuana, Mexico). But my mother was of the opinion that this was dangerous and a Very Bad Idea, so we didn’t partake in the local custom of, as immortalized in The Simpsons, “Celebrate the birth of your nation by blowing up a small portion of it.”

When KC and I moved to Illinois and had our own children, we found that we were in a community with a very BIG 4th of July tradition. City-wide parade, live music and entertainment show, and a gigantic fireworks display to rival Disneyland’s. Now these people took 4th of July seriously. Too seriously, as it turned out. The parade was basically an exercise in town-and-gown politics, where the crowd was constantly looking to one side or the other to figure out who was cheering for which floats. Some people cheered for the local Republican party, the Boy Scouts of America, the Illinois National Guard, and the gun enthusiasts. Other people cheered for the environmental groups, the Marriage Equality float, the anti-war protesters, and the local Democratic and Green Parties. Pretty much the only parade group that got universal approval was the firemen. It was fairly stressful, actually, especially trying to explain it all to your children. The basic idea behind the parade seemed to be, “Celebrate the birth of your nation by demonstrating how impossibly divisive it is.” Lovely. Some years we didn’t even go to the parade, because we just didn’t feel up to the drama. And the live entertainment proceeding the fireworks at the university football stadium was the same way, without the liberal-progressive half of the equation. So we usually just took in a slightly more distant view of the fireworks from the soccer field instead (along with all the other people who liked fireworks but not Kenny Chesney cover bands).

But this year was different. This year we went to a neighborhood parade and street festival at the home of some family friends in mid-town Sacramento and our local fireworks display in Davis Community Park. The parade was led by the local firefighters, followed by a highly dignified carrying-of-the-flags by men and women in uniform associated with a retired Army General living down the street, followed by some restored old-timey cars, followed by everyone and their dogs on bikes, scooters, jogging strollers, unicycles (!), and just walking with funny hats on. My eight-year old son rode a decorated Razor scooter with his friend, waving gleefully for five long blocks. Across the street from the family we were visiting, a local homeowner and his amateur blues band entertained the entire street. Me, I danced like a maniac with my three-year old to “Your Mama Don’t Dance and Your Daddy Don’t Rock and Roll” (yes we do) as he screamed with laughter. So many people on the street were having front-yard BBQs that we eventually lost track of who was attending which party, and it didn’t really seem to matter.

Then, at the fireworks display in Davis, we were treated to a fabulous show, with amazing fireworks set to my kind of patriotic music, the kind that gives me a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. Just music, no lyrics, that captures something timeless and beyond-words about the American Spirit: selections from Aaron Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring; Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue; and everyone’s favorite Sousa march, The Stars and Stripes Forever. Community Park was packed to the gills with people. Picnic blankets overlapping picnic blankets, and nobody seemed to mind. No fuss about whose kids or teenagers were being disruptive, no jockeying for personal space and not wanting to sit too close to someone with potentially offensive political views, and no sense of having been marginalized (or banished to the soccer field) because my kind of patriotism is different than the organizers’.

There’s something profound here about how we come together (or don’t) to celebrate being Americans. And I don’t think it’s just about Davis being a really liberal town. Sacramento is fairly conservative, so I’m sure that there were plenty of people at that street festival who vote differently than I do. But it really didn’t matter. Whether someone was a Democrat or Republican, a supporter of marriage sanctity or marriage equality, drove a gas-guzzler or a hybrid, was just not the point. Everyone was decked out in red, white, and blue. Everyone was having a good time. Everyone was glad to be there and happy to see everyone else. The sense of “We” was bigger than the sense of “Us versus Them.” It made me proud to be an American, frankly. And, until recently for 4th of July, that’s a rare thing. Rarer than it should be.