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A couple of weeks ago, my Aunt Laney threw her annual 4th of July celebration. While I'm not overly patriotic, the rest of my family is, so I attend year after year. Luckily, though, this year she didn't make us wear matching t-shirts for the group picture.

Independence Day is a day when you get together with your family, grill some meat (hamburgers, chicken, steak, doesn't really matter), and shoot fireworks, whether or not they're legal in your state. At my aunt's house, we had paper plates with the flag on them. She gets really excited.

When I was little, one of the last things we talked about in class every year was Independence day. Of course, school got out before the actual day, so we were just encouraged to be good little Americans and blow stuff up. Er, watch the fireworks.

We're taught that, on July 4th, people like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams signed the Declaration of Independence, and while that's not entirely accurate, it was nice to have a date to focus all that patriotism on. Most of the signatures are actually from August 2nd, although not all.

We aren't taught much about the Declaration. It's almost a kind of symbolism. It's not really used for anything anymore, really, because it's served its purpose. Instead we mimic the language (not mock, never ever mock) when trying to sound important, like lawyers at a deposition. Similarly, some of the language in the Declaration was stol.... borrowed from people like John Locke. I suppose this was before plagiarism was something people worried about.

I can remember, when I was in the sixth grade, being forced to memorize the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, which, when considering how antiquated the language is, was difficult for me. I can remember walking down the halls of my high school and seeing a copy on the walls. I couldn't read it, 'cause the handwriting was impossible, but I remember it. I can't remember any teachers I had at that time, but I remember which wall it was on, how high on the wall it hung, where in the hall it was, and how old it looked. I remember because I was told to.