I was in Washington, DC, this year, as I am most years. For me, the Fourth of July is a purely local holiday. During our daughter’s first year of graduate school in New York City, for example, I was bemoaning the fact that she would miss our favorite holiday.

“What are you going to do tonight?” I wailed. “Do they have the Fourth of July in New York?”

There was a long pause. “Ma,” she said in that oh-you-poor-thing tone. “It’s a national holiday.”
         
Well, it never used to seem that way here. Rather it was the day that we disenfranchised Washingtonians would put the federal property in our midst to homely use.

In years when we had a relative or friend working in the White House, we would have our picnic supper on the South Lawn, which would be dotted with a line of portable toilets for the huge crowd of employees and their (generously interpreted) families. Political loyalties swayed, depending on whether or not the president came out to work the crowd, and whether or not there was a truck parked on the driveway to dispense free ice cream.

Other years, we were just as happy picnicking on Lafayette Square or the Mall, among dense but unusually agreeable crowds. We always parked next to the square or the mall, because, as I once explained to a New Yorker friend, my husband has parking karma. “Tell him he can have any woman in New York,” she said.

It’s not the same here now. It takes endless security to get into the White House, even for real guests who don’t have to bring their own food. There is a fence cordoning off the Mall, and parking is banned for blocks around; even the subway stop that opens on the Mall is locked. At least three separate police forces will be patrolling the picnickers, who will have to go through numerous checkpoints. Where the greatest danger used to be from stray Frisbees, which we would smilingly toss back to the apologetic players, citizens are now instructed to keep checking one another out for suspicious behavior.

It’s not that we don’t understand the situation. We are Washingtonians, so we read newspapers. But it all seems like too much trouble.

Tonight we are invited to watch the fireworks from the roof of the Pentagon, but our hosts mentioned that last year, the guests elected to stay on at their house after supper instead, because getting inside the Pentagon, even with their credentials, did not strike people as worth the effort.

The children keep telling us we should give up and spend the holiday in Chicago, where they now live. Apparently, Chicago also has the Fourth of July. However, they warned us, the fireworks are on July third — for reasons best known to Chicagoans.