The country needs pageantry more than ever

This is turning out to be an unusual summer. As the novel coronavirus continues to rage unabated, baseball has yet to play a single game and cooling off at the local swimming pool could be iffy.

Add Fourth of July parades to the list of taboos.

Cities and towns around the country have decided that in the middle of a national public health emergency, the usual celebrations need to take a breather this year so we all might breathe a little easier, and more safely.

While no doubt it’s the wiser choice, it’s too bad because smalltown parades are a living, breathing slice of Americana. It takes a village to put one on. I know because I grew up in one where the Fourth of July parade was a seasonal rite, like trick-or-treating on Halloween and caroling at Christmas.

My hometown, Sewickley, about 12 miles up-river from Downtown Pittsburgh, hugs the Ohio River. I used to watch barges laden with ore navigate upstream to the giant steel mills that put the city on the map.

The town had about 6,000 residents in the early 1960s. It was a place of gracious homes, streets with leafy canopies of old oaks and maples and a landscape marked by church steeples and an old hillside cemetery overlooking the town. It was the quintessential small town where, if everybody didn’t quite know everybody, they certainly knew a lot of them. And they all came out on Independence Day to watch the parade.

It was a homespun affair, kind of corny, but in a good way, and a moving diorama of small-town life.

There’s the high school band resplendent in gold braid, its polished brass instruments gleaming in the sunlight; town officials waving as they sit perched atop spickand-span convertibles with the logo of a local dealership emblazoned on the doors; the aging veterans clad in disparate parts of old uniforms, walking reminders of patriotism and sacrifice.

On Fourth of July morning, my older brother and I would decorate our bikes with red, white and blue crepe paper. We’d weave it in between the spokes so that when the wheels turned, they became spinning pinwheels of colors the faster you pedaled.

Then we’d ride to my cousins’ house a few blocks away to raise the flag. As my uncle, a prominent town physician forever wearing his white lab coat, set about attaching it to the tall flagpole in the backyard, my aunt was in the kitchen, preparing the picnic that we would enjoy later that evening on the porch before the fireworks.

My brother had a bugle but didn’t know a note. (He eventually became an accomplished musician.) Undeterred, he forced whatever sounds out of it that he could, no matter how dissonant, as the Stars and Stripes made its way up the pole. We held our ears and snickered. The neighborhood dogs howled.

The parade route was down Beaver Road, Sewickley’s main thoroughfare. Families brought lawn chairs and found spots on the freshly mown grass of a large church that fronted the street. Many people stood side-by-side on the sidewalks. Children sat along the curbs, waved hand-held flags and slurped cherry ice out of paper cups from Ruth’s Sno-Cone truck parked nearby.

The spectacle got underway. There were fire trucks and police cars, dance troupes and drill teams, high school bands and horses, Shriners in their fezzes driving wacky little cars and veterans. One year I remember a clutch of white-haired old men among a larger group of exsoldiers walk haltingly down the street. They had fought in the Spanish-American War, more than 60 years before. The martial rat-a-tattat and booming cadence of the high school drummers echoed in summer air. Everyone clapped. It was like they had marched out of a history book into the dappled sunlight of a different age.

Perhaps that’s what Abraham Lincoln meant in his first inaugural address, as war clouds loomed, when he spoke of “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave.” Our history and our common resolve in the face of struggle have always bound the nation together.

In its own way, so did the parade. It was part of the town’s connective tissue on those summer afternoons, a moment resonant with goodwill, humor and history. People recognized neighbors on both sides of the street and waved as they watched the colorful procession pass by.

It’s easy, of course, to mythologize the past, as if there was ever a time in our history when turbulence was absent. Back then, civil rights protests were heating up and violent demonstrations against America’s nascent involvement in Vietnam loomed on the horizon. The nation was beginning to split apart, not unlike today. But memory can be kind. It can allow us to recall earlier times and life in soft focus, as a gauzy collection of simpler, carefree days.

Still, it is worth recalling, amid all our current upheaval and feckless leaders stoking political and cultural divisions, that Lincoln in that same speech nearly 160 years ago called upon the nation to seek “the better angels of our nature.”

Perhaps doing so might lead all of us, if only briefly, to sit along the curb together, wave our miniature flags and enjoy the parade.

It’s hard to imagine a better time than now.