My Independence Days tend to be muted affairs, holidays from the rush and crush of everyday life. Possessing what some might call an exhaustive¹ knowledge of American history I tend not to dwell on it on any particular day, but spread my thinking more evenly across every day of the year. Independence Day, therefore, becomes a holiday from work, an evening of fireworks. Two of my favorite² presidents are John and John Quincy Adams, and each Independence Day, I think of what John Adams (senior) wrote to his wife Abigail in the aftermath of the signing of the Declaration on July 2³, 1776:

The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. 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 shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.

I once took the red eye from Los Angeles to New York on the Fourth of July, and can bear witness to the truth of John Adams’s prediction: on a mostly cloudless night flight, I could see from six miles up, one display of fireworks after the other, as if in a long chain that connected one end of this continent to the other.

That event, two hundred and fifty years ago–a quarter of a millennium–is really not as far back in the past as it seems. I read somewhere that, when the Bicentennial took place, we were only three 70-year lifespans⁴ from the Declaration. For the 250th, we are a mere three 80-year lifespans⁵ distant from the Declaration.

We find ourselves under a heat dome this Independence Day here in the DMV⁶. I was out the door for my morning walk at 5:30, excitedly listening to Sirius XM’s 80s on 8 “Top 80 of the 80s” countdown, and surprised to see how many other people were out walking this early on a Saturday. I usually only see the usual die-hards out this early on a Saturday. Given that it was 80°F (~27°C for you metric folks) at 5:30am and that this was the low temperature for the day, I suspect people were getting out before the place turns into a convection oven.

I ran into my pal, Neal, who is celebrating his 90th Independence Day. So much for threescore and ten! He grew up in a house off a road that Thomas Jefferson used to walk to Charlotteville. We stood chatting and I suddenly realized I was being consumed by mosquitoes for the first time this summer⁷.

Returning from my walk, I began to think about my past Independence Days. My fifth Independence Day was captured for posterity by photographer Kathy Krochta for a newspaper article.

I asked my archive, ark about other Independence Days in my life. It turns out that 30 years ago today, I bought myself a brand new, top-of-the-line Compaq Presario 7240 computer. It was a Pentium 133 MHz machine with 16 MB of RAM and a stunningly large 1.6 GB hard drive. I immediately partitioned the drive to allow me to run Windows 95 on one partition, and Linux on the other. Even back then, I couldn’t stop tinkering⁸.

My diary entry for the following year, July 4, 1997, begins as follows:

Just as scheduled, the Mars Pathfinder arrived on Mars this morning WITHOUT A HITCH! What a thrill! It amazes me at the capabilities that we humans have when we really try. The first pictures arrived at 4pm and some 200 more have now been received. The rover is supposed to be deployed on the surface tomorrow.

The success of this mission has brought a thrill back to science and hopefully back to the space program. It certainly needed this triumph and it got it. That is what I want to be a part of someday. That thrill of discovery and success!

John Adams crossed the Atlantic ocean at least four times, each crossing taking a minimum of 5 weeks. I would think about this when flying to Europe from Washington, D.C., wondering what Adams would think of making that progress in hours as opposed to weeks. What, I wonder, would Adams, and Jefferson, and Franklin think of a rover landing on Mars, and seeing images from the planet’s surface mere hours later?

Twenty years ago, I woke early on Independence Day with the first hangover of my life. I was in New York City at the time, and I remember fighting back the pain in my head to drink about half a gallon of water and then walk around Central Park until I started to feel normal again. By the time I went to see a Cyclones’ game that evening, I was feeling much better.

Independence Day 2018 was spent in a sweltering Nashville, Tennessee as part of an extended family road trip. We visited the Country Music Hall of Fame, had dinner at a place called Rock Bottom, and then I took the baby (at the time) back to the hotel while Kelly and the other kids went downtown for a free Lady Antebellum concert. Our hotel room was on the top floor and overlooked the river. We had the TV on a local channel showing the fireworks display, which we could also see, live, right out our hotel window.

This Independence Day will be a quiet one for us, despite the festivities taking place just a few miles from us in Washington, D.C. At more than 100°F (~38°C) today, and with humidity that makes it feel like you are walking into a wall of thick air when you step outside, we are staying in our cool air conditioned home. I am celebrating by reading more of Jill Lepore’s These Truths.

As Michael Scott might have said, “I DECLARE… INDEPENDENCE!” Or as John Adams actually said: “Independence forever!”

1. It exhausts those around me when I express what seems to me to be a fascinating fact, tidbit or anecdote of American history. ↩︎
2. *My favorites*, which should not imply the *best* at the job, although if there is any possible preparation for the Presidency, John Quincy Adams had to be the most prepared candidate in our history. ↩︎
3. Not a typo. The Declaration was signed on July 2, but read to the public on the 4th. ↩︎
4. Psalm 90:10 says that the years of our life are threescore and ten. Complete nonsense, when one considers that a human lifespan was probably half that at the time the psalm was written. Nevertheless, it is the standard literary unit of measure, and I’m using it as such here. ↩︎
5. That same psalm goes on to say: “and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” Such pessimists, those psalmists. ↩︎
6. **D**istrict, **M**aryland, **V**irginia, for those who might confuse this term with Department of Motor Vehicles. ↩︎
7. A few years back, I read a book about Mosquitoes in which the author suggested three things that attract mosquitoes: (1) O-positive blood; (2) Bright colors; (3) the smell of hops. That explains why, while sitting out on the deck, wearing brightly colored shirts, and drinking a beer, the mosquitoes were particularly vicious. ↩︎
8. That machine cost me $2,500 back in 1996, which is the equivalent of about $5,300 today–an amount that would buy me a very high-end Mac mini with 64 GB of RAM and an M5 chip with lots of GPUs… if only they were available. I had been using Unix command line interfaces for work since late 1994, but using Linux on this machine is where I really came into my own, both with Unix and the command line. CLIs (command-line interfaces) are still my favorite interface for using computers, and CLI text editors, like Vim (I am using Neovim to write this) are my favorite text editing tools. Indeed, the shirt that I am wearing today is a black t-shirt emblazoned with the Vim logo. ↩︎