The invitation home

The invitation home

“More than anything, we have lost the cultural customs and traditions that bring extended families together, linking adults and children in caring relationships…When circumstances change more quickly than our culture can adapt to, customs and traditions disintegrate.” — Canadian physician and author Gabor Maté (1944-)

There are certain sounds that instantly transport me back to childhood.

Not songs.

Sounds.

The rhythmic crack of a bat coming through the slightly tinny speaker of an AM transistor radio, Bob Uecker’s unmistakable voice calling the play-by-play as the Milwaukee Brewers played a lazy afternoon game.

The wailing sirens of fire trucks in a parade.

The slap of playing cards hitting a folding table.

If you closed your eyes, it wasn’t just the Fourth of July.

It was summer itself.

Every family has its own Independence Day menu.

Ours wasn’t written down.

It was simply understood.

Grandma Johnson’s secret recipe German-style potato salad.

Charcoal-grilled natural casing hot dogs from Hoffman’s Meat Market, a fourth-generation neighborhood butcher shop in downtown Cedarburg.

Watermelon cooling in the shade.

Boxes of Geiser’s potato chips opened almost before they reached the picnic table.

Coolers packed with ice, bottles of Graf’s cola, orange, grape, root beer and grapefruit-lime 50/50 soda floating in the chilled meltwater for the kids, and bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Blatz and Red, White & Blue bobbing for the adults.

Nobody debated craft beer because the term hadn’t been invented yet. Beer came in pop-top cans and returnable bottles, with every empty bottle representing another deposit headed back to the neighborhood beer depot.

The Fourth of July wasn’t curated.

It was simply Wisconsin.

Every year we’d head north out of Milwaukee on North 76th Street turned Wauwatosa Road, watching the city slowly give way to farm fields, mink ranches, roadside vegetable stands and Carl’s Phillips 66 in Mequon before arriving in Cedarburg. By the time we reached Grandma and Grandpa Johnson’s picnic area at Cedar Creek Park, it already felt like a holiday.

The morning parade along Washington Avenue was first.

Like every kid, I enjoyed the marching bands, veteran processions, community floats and shiny, polished fire engines.

But one fire truck mattered more than all the others.

My Uncle Ronnie would come rolling by, proudly waving as a local volunteer firefighter.

For a few brief seconds, the parade wasn’t something we watched.

It belonged to our family.

Decades later, I followed in his footsteps, serving 16 years as a volunteer firefighter myself in Boulder Junction. Looking back now, I sometimes wonder if those Fourth of July parades planted a seed I didn’t even know had been planted.

After the parade came the real event.

Grandma and Grandpa Johnson’s annual family picnic at Cedar Creek Park.

The adults settled into lawn chairs and around folding card tables, where marathon games of schafskopf — better known around here as sheepshead — euchre and pinochle were every bit as competitive as the Brewers game on the radio. Good-natured accusations of sandbagging flew across the table while Bob Uecker narrated another summer afternoon somewhere in the background.

Meanwhile, my cousins Mark, Krista, Tim and I disappeared into the park along the tree-lined banks of Cedar Creek.

We climbed on the playground equipment, skipped rocks, explored places our parents probably assumed we weren’t exploring and generally did what children did before every pocket contained a glowing screen.

Every so often someone would yell, “Don’t go too far!”

We never knew exactly where “too far” was.

Somehow, we always managed not to cross it.

By lunchtime, the Geiser’s potato chips were disappearing almost as quickly as the Hoffman’s hot dogs came off the grill. Someone always reached for a second helping of Grandma Johnson’s potato salad while another bottle of Graf’s came dripping out of the cooler.

Every few years somebody would ask Grandma for her potato salad recipe.

She would smile.

“Oh, it’s nothing special.”

It most certainly was.

She took it to her grave.

Over the years, family members have tried to recreate it. We all know some of the ingredients — potatoes, vinegar, sugar, scallions, crumbled bacon and bacon drippings — but nobody ever managed to make it taste like Grandma’s.

Sometimes I wonder if the missing ingredient wasn’t simply Grandma Johnson.

Nobody looked at a watch.

Nobody worried about getting home.

The adults visited.

The kids played.

Bob Uecker painted baseball pictures over the radio.

The charcoal smoke drifted lazily through the park.

Summer seemed to have all the time in the world.

As afternoon melted into evening, no one was in any hurry to leave.

We folded up the card tables, gathered our lawn chairs and wandered closer to the park bandshell for the Cedarburg Civic Band concert. Neighbors greeted neighbors. Children chased fireflies through the gathering dusk while the music floated across the warm evening air.

Then came the grand finale.

The fireworks.

Like every kid, I was convinced they were the best fireworks display in America.

The adults smiled.

The children pointed skyward.

For a few magical minutes, every face was illuminated by bursts of red, white and blue.

It was the perfect ending to what, at the time, seemed like a day that would repeat forever.

Looking back, I realize Grandma and Grandpa Johnson weren’t just hosting a Fourth of July picnic.

They were holding a family together — my folks and I, aunts, uncles, cousins, Great Grandpa Langbecker and a mosaic of extended family.

Every year, without fail, everyone knew where they would be on Independence Day.

There was no group text.

No Facebook event.

No online invitation.

You simply showed up.

No one ever wondered where the family Fourth of July would be held. There was never any question.

At the time, none of us imagined those Fourths of July would ever end.

But they did.

Grandma and Grandpa Johnson are gone.

Grandma took her by-memory potato salad recipe with her to the grave.

Uncle Ronnie has passed away.

Sometimes I still picture him waving from that fire truck as it rolled down Washington Avenue, unaware that decades later his nephew would be riding one of his own.

Bob Uecker’s voice no longer crackles through an AM radio on summer afternoons.

Mark and I now have grown children of our own, and Mark, now living outside Nashville, has grandchildren now.

Somewhere along the way, those Fourth of July gatherings quietly disappeared.

There wasn’t one final picnic.

No farewell concert.

No last hand of euchre.

No final fireworks.

One year simply became the next, and life carried us all in different directions.

I’ve noticed that’s happened in a lot of families as the Great Depression and World War II generation passed from the scene.

Not because people quit loving one another.

Life became busier.

Families scattered.

Children grew up.

Grandchildren developed traditions of their own.

The generation that instinctively gathered everyone around one picnic table slowly faded away, and no one quite knew how to replace them.

Every Independence Day, I find myself missing more than Grandma Johnson’s potato salad, Hoffman’s wieners, Geiser’s potato chips, a bottle of Graf’s root beer or 50/50, or Bob Uecker calling another Brewers game.

All of them are gone now.

So are many of the people who made those days unforgettable.

I miss belonging to something that gathered itself without anyone having to ask.

Maybe that’s the quiet lesson hidden inside those old Fourth of July picnics.

Traditions don’t survive on memories alone.

Someone has to decide they’re worth carrying forward.

Perhaps that’s the real inheritance Grandma and Grandpa Johnson left us.

Not the potato salad recipe.

Not the euchre scores.

Not even the fireworks.

The invitation home.

The invitation to gather.

To linger.

To tell the same stories one more time.

To let children run and play until they’re called for dinner.

To listen to a baseball game on the radio instead of through earbuds.

To watch fireworks with people you love instead of through the screen of a cellphone.

This Fourth of July, as America celebrates its 250th anniversary, I hope somewhere a grandmother is making potato salad from a recipe she’ll eventually pass down. I hope somebody uncaps a bottle of soda, opens a bag of potato chips, fires up the grill, shuffles a deck of cards and turns on a baseball game.

Because the greatest family traditions aren’t preserved in photo albums.

They’re preserved by ordinary people who decide that, this year, they’ll be the ones to send the invitation.

And maybe that’s the most patriotic thing any of us can do.

Vilas County News-Review freelance columnist Eric A. Johnson can be reached at eric@fyinorthwoods.com.