I remember when this felt like my party too

Tammy Roe was absolutely certain that the whole country was celebrating her birthday. She lived up the street from us on South Bend’s south side in a neighborhood the families called Rabbit Hill. 31 children had been born along our street within a few years of me, and on the evening of July 4, 1976, all of us were out at once — sparklers going up and down the hill, somebody’s dad setting off bottle rockets in his front yard, fireworks popping against the setting sun. Tammy stood in the thick of it in her birthday dress. Of course the country was doing this. It was her birthday. A couple of kids burned their hands on those sparklers that night. I remember which ones. I remember everything about that evening, actually. It was a night when it felt just right to be an American. It wasn’t just the party up and down our street. The whole year leading up to that night, television showed us program after program anticipating the bicentennial, teaching American history and what made this…