Day: July 4, 2022

4th of July 2022

jeffcnichols1 Comment

July 4th will be a quiet day here in Socal, a day for reflection. I woke up thinking about movies, of all things. Here are my Top 25 favorite movies (OK, 27, but I couldn’t delete any of these once I thought of them), in no particular order:

  • Interstellar
  • Snatch
  • 12 Monkeys
  • The Usual Suspects
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  • Doctor Zhivago
  • Three Days of the Condor
  • Tin Cup
  • Field of Dreams
  • Paris, Texas
  • Close Encounters of the Third Kind
  • The Big Liebowski
  • The Silence of the Lambs
  • Fargo
  • The Godfather
  • The Exorcist
  • Apocalypse Now
  • Gladiator
  • Casablanca
  • The Matrix
  • Dr. Strangelove
  • Blade Runner
  • Lawrence of Arabia
  • Chinatown
  • Body Heat
  • Silverado

By now all those films are old friends. I can start watching one of them at any point in the script and enjoy the rest. I could do another Top 25, but these are the ones that came to mind first.

I also thought of this today – James Taylor’s quiet and beautiful song, “On the 4th of July”:

“On The 4th Of July”

Shall I tell it again how we started as friends
who would run into one another now and again.
At the Yippee Cai O or the Mesa Dupree, or a dozen different everyday places to be.
I was living alone, we were ever so brave on the telephone.
Would you care to come down for fireworks time,
we could each just reach, we step out of line.

And the smell of the smoke and the lay of the land
and the feeling of finding one’s heart in one’s hand
and the tiny tin voice of the radio band singing “love must stand,”
love forever and ever must stand.

Unbelievable you, impossible me, the fool who fell out of the family tree,
the fellow that found the philosopher’s stone, deep underground like a dinosaur bone.
Who fell into you at a quarter to two with a tear in your eye for the Fourth of July
for the patriots and the minutemen and the things you believe they believed in then

Such as freedom, and freedom’s land and the kingdom of God and the rights of man
with the tiny tin voice of the radio band singing “love must stand,”
love forever and ever must stand and forever must stand.

Oh, the smell of the smoke as we lay on the land
and the feeling of finding my heart in my hand
with the tiny tin voice of the radio band singing “love must stand,”
love forever and ever must stand and forever must stand.

All on the Fourth of July, on the Fourth of July.

Truly a great song, one of my favorites from “October Road”. I plan to fire up the big stereo and play that one later.