We’re getting the old house in as good shape as we can in anticipation of a barbecue this weekend. Our book group is meeting at our house at three, and a crowd of other friends are coming at five thirty on Saturday. Our god daughter, Emma, will be here with her mom—they are honorary members of the book group.

Normally, we would have barbecued on Independence Day, but Emma couldn’t come on the fourth this year. She’s working lots of hours as a lifeguard this summer and saving as much as she can in her college fund. In August she matriculates at Oberlin College. We’re very proud of her. She graduated with high honors from Iowa City High School in May. She’s not going to Oberlin for music, and we don’t know what she will decide to do with her life, What we do know is that she will do the deciding, just as she chose Oberlin because of its diverse faculty and student body and because she felt after visiting a good many schools that Oberlin offered the kind of challenge she is inclined to take on now.

For the past several days I’ve been trying to think of something to say about why I love my country, but that immediately puts me at odds with many people I know and love who believe that the country I love, the creation of a liberal establishment, needs to be dismantled in the name of freedom and creativity. I am now to understand that greed is not only good but socially redemptive as well; to accept the destruction of the fundamental institutions of a great nation, everything from public universities to highways and bridges in the name of privatization or that will-o-the-wisp, reform; and to adjust to a public sphere in which swaggering thugs strut about brandishing assault rifles.

So I’ll wave no flags this year. Instead, I’ll think about what it was like to be as young as Emma, when the things I most loved to do came easily. I’ll remember swimming in the lake, canoeing out to a floating pier at Lake Junaluska as Pat Boone’s voice crooned “April Love” out over the water. I worked there in the summer of 1956 as a singer. We created a stir by protesting the segregated swimming pool. I’ll think about rides up the mountain in my roommate’s convertible, and rides back down after dark with the girl I fancied then. I’ll think about how open the world seemed. I didn’t think of that openness as an unearned privilege, but of course it was. I had a ticket to the American meritocracy—that was my birthright.

But tonight after ice cream at Ted Drewes on old Route 66, I’m not inclined to be analytical or judgmental. I’m enjoying a fine summer in the last days of my seventy-fifth year. My garden is grown up as never before. My cup runneth over, because you see I’m still privileged. The world remains open to my concerns and desires. Pat Boone is still singing out over the lake somewhere; and somewhere fine young people who are kin to me, their bodies lithe, their faces devoid of guile, paddle out to a floating pier, tie up their small boats, and share the evening. They’ll swim, some of them will kiss or exchange other endearments; they’ll talk and their talk will be fine summer talk, talk for the time being, talk of the wondrous open world they share. And that’s a good thing.

It’s the best thing I have to celebrate this Independence Day season, except perhaps for the crowds lined up at and around Ted Drewes, some waiting to buy at the windows where young people who will go to college with Ted Drewes’ assistance serve us concretes and banana splits—just ahead of me a beautiful little girl has helped her father collect two huge banana splits to be shared with their family of four as they speak Spanish together. And some across the street sitting on the wall in front of a bank, leaning against it, eating ice cream, some like us who simply lean against the iron rail of Ted Drewes’ parking lot and watch our neighbors as we consume two identical butterscotch mini-concretes. All around us the blessing of openness, of a parking lot one can get in and out of, of camaraderie at the service window (I have met foreign diplomats, Salvation Army executives, priests, scholars, and baseball players there, among others), of the gift of one more blessed summer evening.

—the gift of one more blessed summer evening.