Today is the Fourth of July, Independence Day. It's the day we celebrate when Americans, a time long, long ago, were just a small band of unruly Pilgrims wearing knee-high white socks pulled up over the legs of their pants and carrying guns that looked a lot like trombones.
On the Fourth, we celebrate telling King George III to keep his soggy little island because we'd found a big, new land, which we could steal from the American Indians. Feeling justifiably guilty about that, we later let the American Indians build big, new casinos, where thousands of us go to basically give them our money.
We modern Americans like to gather our families together on the Fourth of July weekend and light up enough explosives in the backyard to imagine what it was like when Francis Scott Key wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner." That's why we also let the Native Americans sell us illegal fireworks.
But not all Americans can afford to spend $9,999 on fireworks for a five-minute display of exploding, colored gunpowder. So we invented the portable gas-barbecue grill.
In the old days, our ancestors had to start their grills with little bits of coal found in paper bags while foraging for food at the corner grocery store.
But no one could get the coal to actually burn until Great-Great-Grand-Daddy Herbert doused it with five gallons of gasoline one day and blew the grill 400 feet into the air. All the womenfolk made funny vowel sounds like, "Ooooh" and "Aaaaaah."
Nowadays, we use propane for outdoor cooking because no American can afford that much gasoline.
A fine American named George Goble holds the national record for a grill lighting. At a picnic in 1994, he poured five gallons of liquid oxygen rocket propellant onto 60 pounds of charcoal and, using a cigarette, ignited a large fireball that he believes reached 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeehaw!
(See it for yourself on YouTube. Search "How to light a grill.")
The grill was ready in two seconds. But you can't even buy that stuff on a reserve. When Goble tried to duplicate his feat on a flimsy, hibachi-style grill, it basically vaporized.
It's a record that, as an American, I am proud to say still stands.
It brings tears to my eyes that, if we hadn't fought the British for our independence, we never would have produced engineers like Goble, who can light a grill faster than a professional baseball player can scratch himself.
Cooking small chunks of large barnyard animals on the barbecue is a typical July 4th activity. Dad will throw neat little packages of cows and pigs on a flaming grill, close the top, grab a beer in one hand and throw the Frisbee to the kids with the other.
When the grill starts smoking so much that water bombers circle overhead, Mom will yell out the window and Dad will chisel off the food, which has now assumed the exact same form as the chunks of charcoal you see in history books.
What you don't eat, the kids can try to blow up later with the illegal fireworks.
If you find your celebration losing steam this year, gather the family and remind them that, in July, we celebrate the birthday of Calvin Coolidge. Remember our favorite president who said, "If you don't say anything, you won't be called on to repeat it."
