Happy 4th of July!

I love the 4th of July. It is my favorite holiday hands down. I love our city parade, I love the concert in the evening, I love the fireworks, I love it all.

Our parade is small by big city standards, but that does not diminish my pleasure in it one whit. You can't watch it without knowing someone in the procession - a Cub Scout, a clarinetist in the high school band, someone driving a decorated tractor. Aunt Ginger lives on the parade route and we will all gather there to wave and laugh as our friends go by.

The evening concert is special for lots of reasons, starting with that it is put on for free by our local symphony, the Central Ohio Symphony. This is the same symphony that my husband Warren is the executive director of and that back in April raised over 2000 pounds of food for our local food pantry with just one benefit concert (a national record).

In short, this is one great symphony before they even begin to play.

On July 4th, the orchestra plays a mixture of patriotic songs and Broadway and movie hits. This year, because it is the 40th anniversary of man landing on the moon, music from "Apollo 13" has made its way into the lineup.

The symphony plays outdoors on the campus of Ohio Wesleyan University, which nestles right up to our downtown. Seating is on the lawn. We bring picnic dinners, sodas, lawn chairs, desserts, blankets, wine, and sparklers; children run up and down the walkways; everyone and everything is decked out in red, white and blue.

This concert draws 5000 or more annually. It is not a noisy crowd but neither is it a performance hall quiet crowd. There is always a low undercurrent of talk, of friends greeting friends, of old neighbors reconnecting. Crowd enthusiasm is obvious from the opening ("Fanfare for the Common Man" and the Star Spangled Banner) and does not diminish the rest of the evening.

During "Armed Forces Salute," veterans and active service personnel stand when their military branch's theme song is played. My dad and brother Mark will be on their feet for the Army; my friend John Smith, a WWII veteran who was at Iwo Jima, will stand up for the Marines. We the audience will applaud enthusiastically.

The last two pieces are always the same: Tschaikovsky's "1812 Overture," followed by Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever." Before the last note has faded, concertgoers are up and moving half a block over to see the city fireworks display. The street by the campus is closed off and we all pitch our chairs and blankets right there on the road or the practice fields and look up until the first one explodes.

I'm also a sucker for fireworks. Always have been. There is something about seeing those colors bloom, shimmer, and fade away that thrills me every year. I ooh and aah right along with everyone else, and "everyone else" includes everyone who was at the concert just 10 minutes earlier.

It is a perfect evening.

30 summers ago, when I was 23, I traveled around Europe for six weeks. I was in Hamburg (then West Germany) on July 4 and homesick, not for my apartment but for America. I wanted to be there - anywhere - in the United States that day. I have never missed another one, including even the summer I was being treated for myeloma and in between stem cell transplants when the 4th came around.

I almost always spend the concert with Sally and Chris, who were my across-the-alley neighbors when I first moved back to Delaware. Back then, we would watch the concert and the fireworks together, then come home and let the kids light sparklers and smoke bombs and throw pop drops until late into the evening. Those were magical days for the children and any of them at the mention of the 4th will still say "remember when we used to light all those fireworks in the backyard after we got home?"

Yes, I do.

On July 3, 1776, John Adams wrote his wife Abigail his thoughts about celebrating Independence Day:

I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

Adams was actually writing about July 2, which was the day the Continental Congress approved the idea of independence. The vote on the Declaration of Independence did not come until the 4th, which is why we have celebrated that day as Independence Day ever since.

No matter. Adams was dead on right when he wrote he believed that succeeding generations would continue to mark the day. The notion that individuals could come together and create a nation founded on principles of justice and equality was a stunning, indeed a revolutionary, idea for its time. It continues to be so today. We the people have not always lived up to those principles, but we the people continue to strive towards realizing them. I am optimistic enough to believe that the ideals that drove Adams and his colleagues to take that giant and dangerous leap into the unknown continue to guide us yet today.

Adams wanted us to mark Independence Day with "Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

I'm with him.