At first they didn’t want to go, Noah and Gabriela, my oldest children, because I had already taken them to Washington, D.C., the year before, a fact they were prepared to litigate at length.
Noah is 14 now and has lately concluded that most of what his father does is faintly embarrassing; Gabriela, 12, has concluded in turn that her brother’s embarrassment is rather absurd, and has taken to rolling her eyes at him rolling his eyes at me, a skepticism passed down like silver.
Neither was moved by my argument that this year carried a significant number attached to it – 250! – and that my employer, the Heritage Foundation, had taken over all of Mount Vernon for an evening to mark it. Noah, like a little attorney, reasoned that if we were flying up for just a single day, we might as well not go at all, or else stay a week. He had a point, the sort of clean, irrefutable logic at which 14-year-olds excel, but the Peachtree Road Race was waiting for me in Atlanta on the Fourth itself, so the trip got squeezed smaller than I wanted to be.
The flight was smooth, the kind that makes you suspicious of the day ahead. We touched down at Reagan National, dropped our bags at the hotel, and set out on foot for the U.S. Supreme Court, which had just concluded a week loud enough to rattle its own marble columns.
Noah and Gabriela asked serious questions the entire walk – about federalism, about the peculiar arithmetic by which 50 small governments and one large one manage not to strangle each other – and their questions told me two things: that somebody at school was doing fine work, and that, as ever, the education was far from finished.
Mount Vernon, however, was the true business of the day. I had not laid eyes on the place since eighth grade, a lapse of some quarter-century that strikes me as somewhat scandalous given that I commute to Washington from Alabama with the grim regularity of a man reporting for jury duty, and might, at any point, have simply Ubered toward Mount Vernon instead of the Capitol and enjoyed, I suspect, considerably more out of the detour.
Here I had once stood, a middle schooler as ignorant of the estate as my own children were now. What survived in memory was the necessary – the outhouse, to use the plainer word – my brother and sister beside me, convulsed with the unmistakable, undignified glee of youth who’ve just discovered that the Father of His Country once had to sit down like everybody else. What we said to one another has not survived. Only the laughing has, which is, I have come to think, generally the part worth keeping.
Noah wanted to see the tomb first, so we went to the tomb first. That’s his instinct, to go straight at the somber things. Gabriela lingered longer at the mansion, cataloging, with ruthless connoisseurship, which rooms she would and would not have tolerated as bedrooms. We ate barbecue and hot dogs off paper plates, and I guzzled two beers that, in that heat, tasted like absolution.
My children drifted from me and back, all evening, in that particular orbit of children who have just discovered that being seen with a parent carries social risk, but have not yet discovered anywhere better to stand. I knew half the crowd, probably more, which meant I was constantly stopped, so they had ample cover to wander and reconvene, like gulls working a pier.
Then Natalie Grant sang the anthem, and near the top, reached for a note so high that Noah grew visibly nervous, certain she was about to ask more of the human voice than it could give. She did not. She held it and let it go, and the crowd exhaled as one. John Rich sang after her, and the Speaker of the House – yes, Mike Johnson – said the sort of words such evenings require.
None of it was the point.
The point came later, when the speeches were done and the three of us stood at the rail above the Potomac, waiting for the fireworks, Gabriela on one side of me, Noah, for once, close on the other, neither of them pretending anymore not to know me. The river did not care about any of this. It moved toward the sea as it always has, indifferent to the pyrotechnics being readied above it, indifferent, for that matter, to the country itself, which is younger than the river by a great deal and will not, I think, ever entirely catch up.
I stood there doing the arithmetic: 250 years of this country, only 12 and 14 of them belonging to the two children beside me, and none of that, not one day of it, chosen. That’s the inheritance.
It’s no small thing to hand children something they did not ask for and cannot refuse and will spend the rest of their life either loving or failing to love. I’ve never believed that love of country comes automatically, as water finds its level; I believe it is closer to a decision, made and unmade many times as one decides, over and over, to love people one did not pick either – parents, siblings – simply because they are yours and you are theirs and there is no undoing that reality, only the question of what you intend to do with it.
The first rocket went up, and broke, and for a moment lit the water the color of an old coin, and I thought of Washington himself looking at that same river with no means of imagining that, two and a half centuries later, the same river would still be catching light, with the people who would inherit his country standing at the rail beside me in shorts and red, white and blue, already arguing – as I hoped then, and still hope now, that they will always be free enough, safe enough, and loved enough to argue – about whether they had wanted to come at all.
That, I have come to believe, is the whole of it: not the fireworks' brief light, not the anthem sung an hour before, but the freedom to argue at all, before people who have not yet decided – and may never entirely decide – what they owe something larger than themselves. I would not have it any other way.
A child who never questions the inheritance has not yet understood what it cost, and a child who questions it and stays anyway – who stays at the rail and does not leave – has understood something the country itself is still trying to learn.
Allen Mendenhall is a Senior Advisor for the Free Enterprise Initiative and a Research Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation. A lawyer with a Ph.D. in English from Auburn University, he has taught at multiple colleges and universities across Alabama and is the author or editor of nine books. Learn more at AllenMendenhall.com.
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