The Americans

Living here in the DC area makes it hard to miss that our nation's 250th birthday is coming up next year. National parks, monuments, and memorials all around us are getting all spruced up for the big anniversary, which, to be honest, wouldn't be on my radar screen at all if it weren't on theirs. But here we are, nearly fifty years after the Bicentennial, a celebration which, by contrast, was on everybody's radar screen in the early 70s.  For three solid years, we were celebrating the 200th anniversary of something in seventy-six different ways.

For example, in December 1973, my sixth-grade class did a play about the Boston Tea Party 200 years after the fact. I played Sam Adams, and my mom made my costume out of a red tweed vest pantsuit, which I had fallen and ripped the knee out of. She turned the pants into breeches and let me wear one of her frilly blouses beneath the vest. With my hair pulled back into a ponytail, I really felt like I was channeling Sam himself. (Maybe that's where I got my fondness for New England-style ales.)

Around that time, the author John Jakes also began publishing his pulpy eight-part series The Americans about both several generations of the fictional Kent family and, by extension, the nation itself, as I was reminded when I read a piece by Carlos Lozado in the NY Times this morning. Like Lozado, the books we had in our house belonged to our parents, but as early teens, we read them anyway, despite a lot of mature content. In his essay, Lozado tells how he recently revisited the series, and his analysis of the saga and its message to and about Americans then and now resonated and made me curious to look up the books I read nearly 50 years ago, which made a lasting impression on me.

Just reading the names of the characters, Philip, Amanda, and Gideon, gave me a little shiver, so I went ahead and purchased the audiobook of volume one, The Bastard. It's thirteen hours long, but I figure I still have a year and three days on the calendar until the quarter millennial. And, as I wrote yesterday, birthdays are a time for reflection.