Independence Day Thoughts, A Day Late

She's a Grand Old Flag and I painted her long ago in a primitive copycatting of Childe Hassam's Fifth Avenue flag painting. With no room now to store seasonal decorations other than Christmas things, it's one of the few Fourth of July decorations I still put out each year. I'll explain the hair scrunchies sitting in front of it soon.

 That little card of the Capitol building goes up each year. Will there ever be another year when the Capitol Fourth program on PBS is played to a live audience, do you think?

There always has to be flag bunting on the front porch. 

Back to the hair scrunchies. They are silk and I ordered them from Amazon recently to tame my long hairdo that still has not seen a hair salon in many months. Has yours?

If your hair is long enough to need scrunchies then I must tell you that I love these, two more not in the picture are ones currently in use. They're a little pricey so I don't toss these around like the old cotton ones I had before that had almost snatched me bald!

And snatching me bald leads me to a story of a scary event that happened in my 5th grade classroom, many decades ago. It was a day when our teacher literally snatched a pupil bald. 

I don't remember what the girl did to bring on our teacher's wrath but I vividly remember Mrs. _______ grabbing the girl by her hair, two seats in front of me. She pulled her hair so hard that the girl fell over on the floor, her desk following with a crash.

I'm talking about a heavy old fashioned wood desk, folks, the kind we had in the dark ages. It scared me to death! The girl was screaming and crying and our teacher continued to yell. She pointed her finger at the door and screamed for the girl to go to the office and then she sat the desk back up, a hank of hair clutched in her fist.

You could have heard a pin drop.

The girl never returned to school and guess what? Our teacher never returned either. Word on the playground the next day was that our teacher had been sent to Central State, which everyone knew was the looney bin.

We were anything but politically correct kids back in the 1950s and in those days no one wanted to be sent there.

Why am I telling you this story? Because I wondered as I thought about this post if what really happened was that our teacher was just sent to another school. I know we have teacher's unions that protect teachers' jobs now, police unions that protect their members' jobs, and so forth. 

Is that why few are held accountable now? I know that unions were formed for a very good reason, to protect employees from employers' unreasonable treatment. And yet I wonder how different things would be if unions also policed their own?

If teacher's unions got rid of bad teachers, if police unions got rid of bad policemen and women, if the Catholic church had gotten rid of bad priests instead of shuffling them around...

Please notice that the last thing I'm stupidly advocating is getting rid of good teachers, good policemen, good priests. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is if we all policed ourselves, what a different world we would live in.

Then I remind myself how difficult it is to police myself. Like, was it really necessary for me to eat the small slivers of this meringue, topped by juicy organic strawberries, and that topped by sugared whipped cream everyday until the last morsel was gone? 

Of course not. But it was so good.

Meringue:
Turn oven to 270 degrees. Butter a 9 1/2 inch pie plate. Sprinkle with sugar. Beat six egg whites until soft peaks form, adding 1/4th teaspoon of salt and 1/4th teaspoon of cream of tartar. 

Gradually beat in 1 cup of sugar until stiff. Add 1 teaspoon of vanilla and 1 teaspoon of white vinegar. Slowly stir in 2 tablespoons of cornstarch. 

Spread in pie plate. Bake in 270 degree oven until light brown (I left mine in a tad too long), 1 to 1/2 hours, not opening oven door. Turn oven off and leave in oven for one hour, still not opening door.