The day my daughter Chloe turned 16 years old, I handed her a box. Inside was a 48-star American flag, folded into a square and sewn long before Alaska and Hawaii were states. “Your great-grandfather wanted you to have this today,” I said. “He sent it a few months after you were born.”
A letter from him accompanied the gift: “I would like to think someday when you are a senator or a CEO of some large company you would have this 48-star Flag that is almost 100 years old hanging in your office. When someone notices it, you can explain that this Flag … was given to you by your great-grandfather who loved the American Flag.”
The word “Flag” was capitalized throughout. My grandfather never missed a chance to honor the Red, White, and Blue, even in black-and-white.
Why We Wrote This
Like many Americans today, my grandfather and I sharply disagreed on politics and what our country represents. But what undergirded our debates was a deep love for our nation and a desire to see it flourish.
Chloe and I were impressed by the 4-by-5-foot banner, admiring its deep red and blue fabric and hand-stitched stars. But the question in her eyes echoed my own growing doubts about the American symbol: What does it mean for me? We returned it to its cardboard shelter, where it sat for many years.
The American flag was personal for my grandfather. Every morning he hoisted one high over whichever house he and my grandmother called home, on a 20-foot flagpole he had installed at each address. It was a daily act of reverence performed with quiet precision. As a child, I was fortunate to help him during our biannual visits.
“Careful,” he’d say. “Never let it touch the ground.”
We methodically pulled apart the folded fabric, and one of his thick hands touched mine, the same hands that taught me to fly a kite when I was 7 years old and guided me down the aisle at my wedding two decades later.
His hands also clung to the flag when he was drafted during World War II and sent to England as a telecommunications specialist. He was there when his comrades landed on the Utah and Omaha beaches in Normandy, France. Though his boots didn’t touch the sand that June 6, 1944, morning, every soldier’s job was critical, he said, and the American flag was essential.
“In times of war, it was so important to our troops to see our Flag flying when returning from patrol. Once they saw it, they knew they were in a safe place,” he wrote in another letter to me.
American soldiers were superheroes to my grandfather. But instead of masks or capes, they wore flags affixed to their right shoulders, with stars facing forward, he told me, so the flag always appeared to be flying as they marched.
As I got older, I began to question his idealistic notions of America, and our visits got more spirited.
He didn’t believe a woman could be president. I told him that as the father of two daughters, and a grandfather to me, he should rethink that stance. We discussed everything from war and voting rights to the environment and immigration. Just as he raised the flag each day without fail, he listened without fail, too. Our debates were as lively as they were loving, and quintessentially American.
“Isn’t it wonderful to live in a country where we’re free to disagree?” he said.
On that we concurred and found common ground in other places, too.
We believed that our nation was better united not divided, secular not proselytized, and that liberty and justice for all citizens were our most valuable currencies. We regarded the Constitution as words to live by. The only exception my grandfather took was burning the flag. And he didn’t waver, even when I reminded him it was a form of protected speech under the First Amendment.
“Well, it might be a right,” he said. “But don’t ever do it in front of me.”
My grandfather died six months before Chloe’s sweet 16. I tried to open the box a couple of times since giving it to her that day, but the ache was too raw.
Lately, however, I’ve been drawn to it. Perhaps because this year marks 15 years since my grandfather died. Or maybe it was because the America he believed in, like the flag, felt like a relic of a different era.
When I finally pulled the flag from the box and held it to my chest, the weight of my grandfather’s absence landed like an eagle. I wanted nothing more than to feel his hand on mine, patting it as he always did after one of our healthy spars, and to hear him say, “We’ll be OK. We’re Americans.”
Staring at the flag anew, I felt a glimmer of hope. Like my memories of him, the colors hadn’t faded at all. The stitches holding the red and white stripes together held firm, and the proud stars pierced through a sea of blue, waiting for someone to believe in them again.
I’m not sure what I’ll do with it yet. Maybe I’ll frame it for Chloe, who my grandfather came to believe was capable and deserving of every opportunity she was afforded.
For now, the flag is out of the box, reminding me that it flies for all of us. That feels like something he’d be proud of.
