July 4, 2008

It was July and there were plates and paper napkins and platters of food and crumbs of food everywhere. It was all kosher, I think, unless maybe you mixed this with that - but no, it must have been since that's the kind of house we were in. And there was beer and then wine or we begin with wine and end with gin and wake up to beer after the smears of fireworks and a little roman firecandle or roadworks spitting fire like a narcoleptic, winking, night lamp in the backyard beyond the gas grill. It was a round table with a plastic table covering and the shirts were cotton or taken off entirely or polyester like the pants by the pool (the ones that were not taken off entirely) and of course it was Connecticut when Connecticut still smelled fragrant and the Maple leaves were dark green and the Oak Ferns were light green but the Azalea was radiant and red and the garden, despite how coiffed, had an overwhelming thickness that the ebb and lull of Cicadian rhythms locked in hemiola. There were other tables - square and rectangular with taut-skinned older folk (and soft-skinned older folk, too) arranged more hierarchically than us at our round table and with diminished appetites and more sobriety (only in a few cases). Everyone had eaten and we were all just waiting for the dark to see the works and sitting at the tables taking in the liquids or jumping in and letting the liquids take us. One or two might've exchanged a fluid but no one cared, or noticed. And then there were the cocktail umbrellas since it had been sunny all day and unbearably hot - the thick heat that is how you know Connecticut is still Connecticut and the cocktail of choice makes no difference. It's simply the one of the moment - so despite floral patterned paper umbrellas in the cups next to the platters, we begin to pull apart all the ones in our drinks or next to the platters or our plates and we pull them all apart and realize that beneath the dyes and the ornate, cartoonish flowers (someone's nearby father or grandfather or both still said 'Oriental') are characters and not the kind that spell familiarity but the kind that connote political incorrect trips over typification and someone said Said and we unraveled more and uncovered someone's very distant but still DailyNews that had been dyed and dried and repurposed for positioning just to the left of the Uncle Sam napkins and the Independence Platters in the crushed ice cup of some American sorts in the backyard garden of a dignified real estate noble or mogel hosting one of those characteristically July Connecticut Freedom Feasts and warding off the rain with the distant, daily news of a place where Said said or continues to say that this day the day of our independence day is not a holiday but a day where they repudiate our leisure with their labor someone said Said even says that there they may or may not.