I Never Felt More American Than on the National Mall on the Fourth of July

ALEXANDRIA, VA – As America celebrates its 250th birthday tomorrow, I’ve found myself thinking less about this year’s fireworks and more about the Fourth of Julys I’ll never forget.

Over the past week, I’ve heard from more friends than I can count who have decided not to go to the National Mall this year. Some don’t want to spend hours in Washington’s July heat. Others don’t want to wait until 10:30 p.m. for the fireworks show to start. Parents with young children say it’s simply too late, and many have decided they’ll watch from somewhere else—or stay home altogether.

Listening to them, I realized I wasn’t just thinking about a tradition. I was remembering a feeling. For about a decade, there was no place on Earth I’d have rather spent the Fourth of July than on the National Mall.

Back then, I lived in Fairlington, just off Quaker Lane on the Arlington/Alexandria, VA line, and Washington felt wonderfully close. If you got an early start on the Fourth of July, you could be on the Mall in ten or fifteen minutes. One of us always headed in early to claim our spot, then came back for the rest of us. We’d load the coolers, a boombox, folding chairs, a Frisbee, a volleyball, and enough food and drink to last the entire day, then hop back onto 395 to head for the fun.

The walk from the car always felt like the official beginning of the holiday. We were all lugging bags of ice, sandwiches, potato salad, chips, plenty of beer, and whatever sounded like a good idea when we were twenty-five. We didn’t know charcuterie then.

Someone always showed up with cold Jell-O shots in every color imaginable. And more than once someone brought a vodka-soaked watermelon. Another group of friends inevitably arrived late, triumphantly carrying giant buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken as though they’d just rescued the day.

By the end of the afternoon, one or two of those old aluminum folding chairs with the scratchy woven webbing had usually given up the ghost. Somebody always sat down a little too hard, somebody else leaned back a little too far, and more than one bent-up chair wound up sticking out of an overflowing trash can on the walk back to the car.

And somehow, we always found one another.

There were no cell phones, no texts, no GPS, and no dropped pins. We simply said, “We’ll meet on the Mall in that place,” and somehow we did. We kept our eyes up instead of down because there wasn’t anything to look at except a map and maybe a cold drink. We looked for our friends instead of our phones, and every Fourth of July our little group came together.

We weren’t documenting the day. We were living it.

Once we got settled, the National Mall became our neighborhood. Pickup volleyball games appeared out of nowhere, Frisbees floated through the humid Washington air, and I was such an awful volleyball player that I had an uncanny ability to send the ball back over the net with my face instead of my hands. It happened often enough that everyone laughed—including me. Before long, the people around us didn’t feel like strangers anymore.

Honestly, I couldn’t have told you whether the group sitting next to us voted Republican or Democrat. It never occurred to me to wonder. We weren’t gathered because we agreed on everything. We were gathered because America was having a birthday.

That was enough.

As the sun began to sink, the day naturally shifted gears. The games fizzled out. People wandered back from one last walk, grabbed a cold drink, maybe lit up a smoke, settled into their chairs, and turned toward the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. You could feel the anticipation building across the Mall. Nobody had to announce it. We all knew what we were waiting for.

Then the National Symphony Orchestra began to play. Even now, writing those words gives me goosebumps.

The music floated across the warm July air as the last traces of daylight slipped away. Those magnificent white marble buildings came alive. The Washington Monument stood against the deepening blue sky like a beacon. The Lincoln Memorial glowed across the Reflecting Pool, and the Capitol shimmered in the distance.

Year after year, I looked around and had the same realization. I wasn’t simply at a fireworks show. I was standing in the symbolic heart of the United States on the one evening every year when the nation gathered to celebrate its extraordinary beginning and the enduring promise of America.

Standing there, surrounded by our nation’s history, listening to the Symphony, waiting with thousands of fellow Americans, my heart filled with a pride that, even today, I still can’t fully explain.

Then we’d see the first trails of smoke climbing into the night sky.

We never called them “shells” back then. That’s a new fireworks term I’ve only learned this year. Sometimes they whistled as they rose, but those little smoky streaks ascending told us something glorious was about to happen. A heartbeat later, the sky erupted.

From where we always sat, it looked as though the fireworks were bursting above the Lincoln Memorial, bathing it in flashes of red, white, blue, and gold. The music and the pyrotechnics became one performance, each compounding upon the other until it was impossible to separate what you were hearing from what you were seeing.

Within seconds came the sound all of us never forget—not the fireworks, but the crowd. For seventeen or eighteen spectacular minutes, every booming burst was answered by another chorus of “Ooooooh…” and “Aaaahhhh…” Thousands of voices reacting together. Couples instinctively reached for each other’s hands. Veterans stood a little straighter. Every face turned toward the same sky.

And then, before we knew how much time had passed, came the finale.

Whether my memory has polished it over the years or not, I still believe I can hear the galloping finish of Rossini’s William Tell Overture. As the music raced toward its triumphant finale, one trail of smoke after another climbed into the night before bursting into great sprays of red, white, blue, gold, and green. They didn’t simply explode and disappear. They hung in the air for a few seconds, sparkling and drifting, as tiny embers floated back toward the earth like fireflies slowly losing their magic.

For those few thunderous moments, the black Washington sky became a canvas, and those magnificent white marble monuments caught every fleeting color. One burst faded as another stretched skyward, until it seemed as though the fireworks never stopped. They came in waves—one after another, then five at once, then ten—filling the sky with light while the music carried everything forward.

It was impossible not to feel your heart swell.

I’ve spent forty years trying to explain what those moments felt like. I still can’t.

All I know is that, for one magnificent evening every year, I felt like I was standing in the very center of the American story.

Even the trip home became part of the celebration.

Eventually we’d fold up the chairs, close the coolers, and make the long walk back to wherever we’d managed to leave the car that morning. Sometimes it was along the George Washington Parkway. Sometimes it was on a side street we’d somehow remember twelve hours later.

Traffic barely moved, but nobody seemed to mind. The windows were rolled down, warm air drifted through the car, and instead of impatient horns there were cheerful little beeps and waves through open windows. Complete strangers smiled at one another because we’d all just shared something extraordinary. We’d replay the show, laugh about the volleyball games, tease whoever had shown up late with the Kentucky Fried Chicken, and somehow make a traffic jam feel like part of the celebration.

Nobody wanted the evening to end. I don’t have a single photograph from any of those Fourth of July celebrations. I don’t need one. Those memories have stayed with me more vividly than photographs ever could.

This year’s celebration promises to be unlike any before it. Organizers plan a 40- to 45-minute fireworks show beginning around 10:30 p.m., with approximately 850,000 fireworks effects launched from multiple locations around the National Mall in an attempt to set a world record.

I’m sure it will be spectacular.

And I sincerely hope everyone who goes has a wonderful time.

Still, I can’t help thinking about the people who have already told me they’re staying home this year. Some don’t want to spend hours in Washington’s scorching heatwave. Others don’t want to keep little children out until nearly eleven o’clock before the fireworks really get underway. A few simply don’t want to battle the crowds and the long trip home afterward. I understand every one of those decisions.

I’m almost sixty now myself. If I’m not on the Mall, I’m usually watching the PBS broadcast from home, and these days I’m often thinking about bed long before 10:30. Time has a way of changing all of us. What I hope never changes is the feeling.

I hope today’s young couples and young families discover what so many of us were lucky enough to experience—not simply a fireworks show, but a day spent in the symbolic heart of our country, where strangers became neighbors, where the National Symphony and those gleaming white marble monuments created a backdrop unlike anywhere else in the world, and where, for a few precious hours, it felt as though we all belonged to something bigger than ourselves.

I guess every generation creates its own traditions. Because my greatest wish isn’t that today’s Fourth of July looks exactly like mine.

It’s that forty years from now, someone else sits down to write about a Fourth of July that filled them with the same pride, the same gratitude, and the same sense of belonging that those days on the National Mall gave me.

For me, those Independence Days weren’t about breaking records. They were about making memories. And those memories have lasted a lifetime.

Because for me, there was no place on Earth I’d have rather been.