I spent July 3rd at the beach at Tow Bay in Massapequa, Long Island, with Susan Woodbury, who was my best friend when we were 12, and her husband Vin, and their daughters and friends. We’ve done this most Thirds or Fourths for about 15 years. Susan works in the public school system and Vin is a manager at Verizon. Their now-grown daughters used to babysit for my now-grown son. Susan and Vin have a 40-year-old houseboat, about 30-feet long and 12-feet wide. It’s the kind of boat that used to bob in the background on “Surfside Six.” It doesn’t really move anymore but it still floats. It’s docked at the pier at Tow Bay and it’s full of beer and food and wet bathing suits. We meet at the boat in the morning and take big bursting coolers of beer and potato chips and hero sandwiches to the beach a hundred yards away. 

It’s a real Long Island beach, just down from Jones Beach, and the waves are big and heavy and crashing and I once got caught in a riptide-undertow there.  It was about ten years ago on a bright afternoon and the grownups were standing breast-high in the water and laughing.  Suddenly I got caught, swept and pushed by something, and suddenly I was moving. I was smiling — I think I was embarrassed — but I looked at Vin who was a few feet away, and he read what was happening and leaned, stretched out his arm, took my hand, jerked me off my feet and reeled me toward him. He was really strong. He didn’t say anything. Then he said something like, “That was interesting.” People barely noticed what had happened but I felt death had been at my feet and Vin got me from it. Well that’s more dramatic than I meant to be.

We sit at the beach all day. It was on this beach 15 years ago that I first noticed America was getting obese. It was sitting on the houseboat that I realized America was getting rich, that people who used to be called working class had speedboats and gold necklaces and big watches. At the end of the day, at dusk, we barbecued hamburgers, chicken and hot dogs. Vin stayed over on the boat and listened to a ballgame. The girls and I and Susan usually go back to the house, and the next morning we have chocolate Dunkin’ Donuts and coffee and read Newsday, and then I come home on the LIRR.

This year I went back into the city late on the night of the third. The next day, on the Fourth, I met my aunt for lunch and shopping and met up with the woman I describe in this column, which I wrote that night. 

We spent Independence Day in Los Angeles, where I had just gone back to work on new episodes of Boston Legal. My husband Marsh and I set out on a big hike in the early morning. A few yards out, we both were panting and realized that it was not hiking weather for the elderly. We turned around to hang by the pool pretending to read but basically snoozing. Then, around four o’clock, we drove to our new weensy house overlooking the coast where we plan to move for the "downsizing period" of our advanced lives. There is, yes, a hot tub (the turbo kind) where we planned to watch the fireworks. It promised to be a real Cialis moment. But, alas, we could not figure out how to turn on the hot tub much less heat it, so we watched the news instead and ate Whole Foods takeout. Fresh and tasteless. After that, we watched a couple of "Law and Orders" by which time it was nine o’clock. Fireworks time. They were of course gorgeous.

Before we went to bed, we decided to spend next July 4th at the house. By then we’ll have figured out the hot tub thing. Or maybe we’ll just have a few elderly friends over to watch.

We don’t celebrate the Fourth of July in Europe. My children assumed the French were stupid about fireworks and throughout the years I hid a lot of them in my suitcases when we flew from New York to our house in Cap Ferrat for summer vacations. I sold that house and exchanged it for a yacht to live on during the summer months so now I am floating on the Fourth of July. You have no idea of the bliss of living on a boat if you have never lived on one. The cobalt, twilight-blue sea at eight o’clock in the evening and the lights sprinkled over the shore and the only sound a tiny splash below to remind you that you are on water. The world is more beautiful from a boat and my smallest grandchild always reminds me that I am a very lucky grandma. But she, too, wanted fireworks. I was ready and, on the Fourth of July, I watched my grandchildren’s eyes rock and roll as we set off our amazing American fireworks in the bay of Beaulieu in France. 

I went to the movies. While that may sound simple and easy, it was not. We were in the Hamptons and I asked three grandchildren who live nearby if they’d like to go to "Ratatouille" on the 4th of July afternoon. Two other grandchildren heard about it and signed on. Then two of their friends asked to go. To my amazement, all the parents then said THEY wanted to go, so I now have to get tickets for the 12 of us in advance — seniors, regulars and children — and to work out the transportation. As for food, my son-in-law had a chef (who is also a friend) cook for us. He is the Picasso of chefs, so our lunch and dinner are about as typically American as those served in any three-star restaurant in Paris (and as ratatouille, for that matter) except much, much better. This is my idea of a perfect Fourth of July.

On the glorious Fourth I was at the country club in Old Lyme, CT, with my nine-year-old godson watching the fireworks and other entertainment laid on for wholesome all-American denizens of the Nutmeg State in a tranquil setting of big swimming pool, golf greens and tennis courts. What could be more WASPy American than that? My good pal the writer Dominick Dunne will be in attendance.

So, this year I have to interrupt my work week to spend a holiday on a Wednesday near the Connecticut River. But it will be worth it because I grew up thinking country-club cuisine  was the world’s greatest.  As my friends like to make fun of me – “Or anything smothered in mayonnaise or chocolate sauce!” Oh well, we can’t all grow up to be eclectic.

I guess I should add a P.S. that I am not a member of this country club.  But I did lecture there twice and raised the money for them to buy their new pool outdoor furniture, so I am a kind of insider-outsider.

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I have spent July 4th, for the past 13 years, at the Town Park in Pound Ridge in Westchester County, just 50 miles north of New York City. This year I went with a few neighbors and the new amazing man I love and now live with. The holiday wasn’t always this good. In fact, it was never this good. We brought a blanket and some wine and sat on the lawn with folks in their jeans and baseball caps with their babies and Labradors. Everyone oohed and aahed at the fireworks and their cracklebooms. I enjoyed the show for the first ten minutes and then, after that, I pretended to enjoy it some more. My mind wandered. Were those sparks going to fall on our heads? Were there any ticks crawling up my shorts? How will we ever find the car now that it’s pitch black? And, inevitably, how the hell are we going to get out of Iraq and doesn’t everyone in the world hate America and are they right? July 4th in Pound Ridge has a small-town heart that I love, but I wish I could get out of my New York City brain.

We’ve come out to Los Angeles for the Fourth to see our daughter Taylor and help her with last-minute wedding planning. When I got married (the first time), my mother did everything. I don’t remember her asking my opinion for a single thing. Once again, I’ve been cast to the sidelines. Taylor is “the decider” of this wedding. I’ve taken to calling myself “Brinksy.” I drive along, toss out the bags of money and just keep going!

Well, that’s not entirely true. I was allowed to go with Tay to buy her dress (it was a hoot, especially Kleinfeld’s!); and now on the Fourth I’m being employed as a seating consultant.

I’ve become something of an anthropologist, discovering that the American wedding of the year 2007 has a formula. That my daughter is following it as if it were a Julia Child recipe – not to be tampered with – has me stunned.

Taylor played football in seventh grade. Not girls’ football. She was a right tackle on the boys’ junior varsity. She wore a face guard, for Christ sake. Who ever thought she would want a dainty veil?

Who is this girl? I was so sure this child would never wear a traditional white dress with a train (wrong); or have bridesmaids (she has a slew including her brothers Ben, Justin and Marc); or a tent, band, caterer, waiters, flowers – and most assuredly, she would never want a three-day destination wedding.

Just shoot me.

Part of the formula includes a two-day bachelorette party for the bridespersons (including massages). That took place this past weekend, and even though I was out here (alone in the dark), I was not invited. I was allowed to go to the cake tasting, which was as indulgent as it sounds!

A friend explained to me that the wedding “formula” is a throwback to the 1950s. The brides today are reacting against their own mothers (natch) – the bra burners of the ‘60s who either got married barefoot on the beach, or like me (the second time), took off an hour from work to find a judge and elope.

I’m coming to realize that Taylor has been planning this wedding in her imagination for a long time … maybe years. And the truth is I’m loving seeing her at her happiest ever. And yes, we love him too!

Editor’s Note: Julia Reed’s new book, The House on First Street, is now available! Click here to check it out.

This year, I spent the Fourth of July in exile from my husband, my dog and my friends, holed up in my mother’s beach house on Florida’s Gulf Coast, trying to gain independence from the book deadline that has been hanging over my head for so many months.  I’ve gone slightly crazy. In the interest of simplicity and structure, I have put myself on the “wrinkle-free diet” I found in the kitchen drawer (salmon, oatmeal, melon, berries for breakfast; salmon, salad, melon, berries for lunch; salmon, spinach, melon, berries for dinner) while pathetically opening e-mails from Williams-Sonoma, advertising their mini-burger press and grill pan, and accompanied by a truly gorgeous photograph of tiny hamburgers topped with melting pimento cheese sitting on Parker House rolls.

I was feeling good about being so diligent — and curious to find out if my face would miraculously become wrinkle-free — when I came across a passage from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. I have it with me because I just wrote something for The New York Times Book Review about her new novel The Maytrees, which I recommend, but The Writing Life is the kind of book that seems designed solely to make other writers feel guilty and to bore the rest of the population to death. Anyway, she describes working on a book on the second floor of an empty college library; it’s the Fourth of July, but she professes not to know it (“I had forgotten all of wide space and all of historical time”). She says it took a half hour for the steady pop of fireworks to even register, and when it did, she assumed she was hearing June bugs flying into the glass. She didn’t know what was going on until she opened the blinds, “and it all came exploding in on me at once — ah yes, the world.”

I am apparently way too much of this world to ever attain that level of Zen-like concentration. I know perfectly well that what I’m hearing outside is fireworks, and they are oddly comforting, as are the shouts of the children and the faint strains of the small-town philharmonic soloist singing “God Bless America” on the green. If I were Dillard, I imagine I’d keep the door shut, but then if I were Dillard I probably wouldn’t have taken a break on Sunday to watch “Foyle’s War" (my favorite of the PBS “Mystery!” series) or on Monday for “The Closer” (I am crazy about Kyra Sedgwick and all her detective sidekicks). There was no Internet when Dillard wrote her book but had there been, I’m sure she would not have availed herself of mass e-mails from a kitchen catalog, nor would she have thought — a lot — about those burgers. (When she’s writing she generally eats once a day, she tells us, at night, before a long walk and more writing).

Still, in my own way, I soldier on, piling my bags of spinach and romaine on the checkout counter and resisting the Soap Opera Digest in front of me, with its cover story on “General Hospital,” even though I am worried to death about Jason and Elizabeth. I’m getting there, I’m getting there. And next year, I vow that I will be truly independent, grilling those burgers or some lobsters or whatever happy people grill on the Fourth of July — grilling for my husband and my dog and my friends, who will fill this house. And then we will watch the fireworks and listen to the lady sing.

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.