A Rainy Fourth of July

Technically the Fourth of July is over, but fireworks are still blasting away in pockets across town. There's more at stake this year, those blasts are saying--more to celebrate, more to release. (As I type, a sonicky boom just went off, somewhere to the west.) 

It was rainy today. There was lightning, thunder. But we still did some Fourth of July things--not all of them, but some. (Sparklers, veggie dogs, fresh corn, National Treasure, flags.)

Before the storm, I got out a new Bosch drill, and drill bits I've had for years. 

Years. 

I shipped these drill bits back to the US from Rome in a cardboard box (filled with other things, too--books, linens, kitchen detritus, clothes). The plastic cylinder the drill bits live in still has its price-tag, which is inscribed with the name of a little local hardware store that still exists on Via Celimontana, in Rome. (I googled it.)

Ironically or not, I learned to use a drill (and a hammer, a band saw, and a circular saw) in my undergraduate theatre class, from a professor from Tokyo who was marvelously serious about  construction technique. 

I moved to Rome a few years later, and could hear Hiroshi's voice in my head (always "Hiroshi"--he insisted that we call him by his first name) as I drilled and hammered together a bed, a nightstand, a table, two chairs, and a sofa in my miniscule, non-air-conditioned apartment near the Colosseum.

I was in this hot, cramped apartment during July, and certainly July 4th, but I can't recall the day or holiday. There was a jazz fest on the closest hill that month, an Irish pub that spilled out into the street in the summer. The fireworks I remember were for other people's weddings in the country, at the beach.

A Rhode Islander I worked with had been in Rome for decades. He spoke with an Italian lilt. One day, he smoked a cigarette on the curb near our office, stubbed it out and started talking about fried clam rolls. We were flanked by yellowish buildings. Down the street, past a gray criss-cross of buses and motorini, the sky and umbrella pines at the edges of the Borghese Gardens. 

That July in Rome, I started dreaming in Italian. I was homesick for American things--mass-market paperbacks, Twizzlers, Ziploc bags, cineplexes, industrial-strength air-conditioning. There was a lot of anti-American sentiment in Rome at the time--you walked down the street, past the cafes and wine bars, and you could hear it slithering around. 

Today, I fished out the drill bit from that same little ferramenta in Rome and hung up a new flag post, and a new flag in a heavier weight. Something a bit more storm-proof. It started to rain, then a flash of lightning. The Roman drill started to strip the screws, and I heard Hiroshi's voice in my ear, behind undergraduate me, admonishing my technique in a silvery whisper, telling me to drill from my upper arm, my shoulder. 

And then the flag was up.