BIRMINGHAM—There is an American flag flapping outside my hotel. A slight breeze lifts the banner while the sun rises over Magic City.
A hotel janitor with dreadlocks is standing beside me, we’re watching the flag flap while I drink my morning cup.
Two hundred and forty-four years. That’s how long the colonist’s colors have been flying from flagpoles like this. I bet the early colonist’s worst critics never saw that coming.
They are brilliant colors. To watch the 13 battered stripes flutter in open Alabamian daylight, putting on their morning matinee, never fails to move me.
“Pretty ain’t it?” says Jefferson County’s leading custodian.
I nod.
He cracks the tab on an energy drink. “My daughter’s in Girl Scouts. She folds’em sometimes. Flags, I mean.”
I’m not sure why he’s telling me this, but I grin anyway.
“How old is she?”
“Leaven. And sassy.”
“She get that trait from Mom or Dad?”
“Shoot.”
We’re quiet for several minutes.
Then: “Yeah. She practices folding flags with my mom sometimes, for Scouts. They use a big ole bed sheet so they don’t drop it. My daughter always be shooing me away, saying, ‘Daddy, get out the
room!’”
“Really.”
He sips. “Sassy.”
And I’m thinking about how our flag was designed by New Jersey congressman Francis Hopkinson in 1777, first stitched by Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross. And 244 years later Girl Scouts are still folding them into tight triangles.
He makes a professional inquiry. “So how’s your stay with us, sir?”
“Great.”
“Good, good.”
My hotel is nothing fancy, it’s your basic highway-side deal. But it’s clean. There’s even a continental breakfast featuring the American traveling-man’s greatest hits. You have your expired yogurt cups, English muffins suitable for usage in hockey tournaments, and “egg-like” omelettes that glow in the dark.
And, of course, there’s complimentary carbonic acid which someone mislabeled coffee.
“She sells cookies,” he says.
“Come again?”
“Scout cookies. My daughter sells’em.”
…