My Independence Day
by Barbara Krasner
Terry was unlike my other friends. She was the only girl in a family of boys. She worked as a pump jockey at a gas station in Belleville. She drove her mother’s tank of a Chevy station wagon, usually barefoot with her left leg pulled up and bent, or cross-legged beneath her. She oozed confidence. She was a powerful athlete and possessed heaps of practical knowledge. Her family didn’t have much money. Her parents had divorced, and Terry lived in a small house with her mother and brothers on Devon Street in the Schuyler School district.
We became friends, I don’t quite remember how or when, in high school. We were in some of the same accelerated classes. She became a member of our German Club bowling team, even though she took French. She packed a mean wallop on the alleys.
Between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I had just started an American Government elective course at Rutgers Newark. I had finished a 300-level course, World Politics, and loved it. Professor Chen respected my opinions. He made me interested in my having a Weltanschauung, in reading the New York Times international news section. He waxed poetic about Henry Morgenthau, Senior, ambassador to Turkey during the Armenian Genocide.
But in this new 200-level course, the professor had already made it clear he didn’t like me. He wouldn’t call on me even after staring me down until I dropped my raised hand. Even if my hand had been the only one raised like Tracy Flick in Election. Maybe I asked too many questions or had too many opinions.
On July Fourth, 1976, after two semesters of keeping in touch through letters — we used the same Current®-brand stationery — from her Lesley College mailbox in Massachusetts and my Douglass College mailbox in New Jersey, Terry picked me up for the two-hour drive down the shore to Belmar. The beach and I didn’t get along. I tended to blister — even in the shade, even with an almost unlawful SPF Sun Protection Factor strength — to the point of sun poisoning.
I brought my textbook with me. It was one of those expensive ones you’d never use again except maybe if you were going to major in political science, which I wasn’t. It had a yellow-orange cover; you’d think the publisher would have designed it in red, white, and blue. It seemed somewhat appropriate to read about the three branches on the day, the checks and balances between them, and the separation of powers as we celebrate independence.
I lay there on my oversized beach towel, elbows digging into the sand beneath, holding the book in a way to shield my face and with my whole back exposed to the sun. Armed with a highlighter and a pen, I prepared to absorb myself in 790-201 American Government, to annotate my thoughts and observations.
But the only thing I absorbed was ultraviolet rays. Reading something serious on a crowded beach on an iconic holiday was a bad idea. With the sound of low-flying prop planes dragging advertising messages — July Fourth Special Clams at Jenkinson’s Pavilion with Free Soft Drink — and personal messages — Congrats Tony and Louise on Your 20th — the squawk of gulls, the squeals of kids, and crash of waves, reading on the beach was best done with trashy novels.
I wanted to daydream, read Seventeen magazine, eat a hot dog, drink a cold diet soda, and slurp an Italian ice. I did not want to read serious text that required my full concentration in trying to figure out United States government, even in this bicentennial year.
Nobody forced me to take these summer classes. And why I chose political science, I couldn’t say. I never read newspapers or watched the news. I never showed interest in current events, only historical ones. I didn’t need poli-sci to meet any core curriculum requirements; I had already accomplished this with my history classes.
I took these classes because I didn’t have anything else to do that summer besides shopping in downtown Newark with my best friend, Denise, and chatting at my house with Mike, whom I’d known since kindergarten. He popped up every now and then. Perhaps as a language major — German and Russian — I subconsciously felt I needed to know more about the way the world worked. And the courses fit into the morning schedule, leaving me all afternoon for homework and going to Willowbrook Mall or the Lincoln Theater at night with Terry.
I looked up from my book, and two kids kicked sand onto the pages. I brushed them off, scrounged around for my highlighter melting somewhere in the sun. Two fingers to my forearm told me I was already burning.
I returned to the book and began to yell at the professor in my head: All you do is lecture. You don’t ask us what we think. I have thoughts, and I want to be heard. I’m an independent thinker! And I demonstrate my independence on Independence Day. I put the cap back on the highlighter, closed the book, and said to myself, I’m done. I’m dropping the class. Professor W., I’m making the decision to drop you.
Early on in my freshman year, a senior in my dorm told me, “If the class doesn’t feel right the first day, drop it; drop it now, because it won’t get any better.” I knew she was right. The same is probably true with relationships, but that would take me many more years to understand.
Terry, clearly, would say the same thing. Not one to hem and haw, she made decisions and accepted the consequences. She didn’t care what others thought. She followed her own path. She knew what she wanted — to teach special ed — and chose her college carefully. She didn’t take the path of so many others in our graduating class: to attend one of the New Jersey state colleges. I suspect she received a great scholarship. She was a free spirit, a kind of 1970s Isadora Duncan.
I wanted to say to Prof. W.: You can ignore my raised hand in the classroom, even when it’s the only one waving in the air. You can cut me down in public humiliation to seemingly prove your own worth. But I can drop you, cut into your ego, stop my own pain, and never run into you again, because I don’t typically attend this school.
He didn’t think I was special. When I answered his question, having to yell it out, because he wouldn’t acknowledge me, he just said, “No.” He didn’t like me. Maybe he didn’t like the way I wore my hair, or that I wore my nails long with pink polish, or corrected his German pronunciation, admittedly a bad habit. I was not privy to his thought process. I had not known of him or about him before this class in that usual way former students would give you the scoop on a professor during registration periods in the days before Rate Your Professor online.
What made his class so frustrating for me was the previous World History class. Professor Chen had international experience. Though it took me a few days to understand his accent, I eventually hung on his every word. He invited our thoughts, our opinions, our observations. He understood that real learning comes from within, where we develop our own insights, our own connections to the material, and don’t merely regurgitate the words on the page or the board.
With sweat dripping down my face and the sun beating down on my back, I reached over to my canvas bag and deposited the textbook. Now I could enjoy the day like everyone else. We stayed maybe four hours before leaving.
At home, the soft coolness of the air conditioning soothed my sunburned skin. Was going down the shore really worth the pain? I searched the bathroom cabinets for Solarcaine. I sprayed the whole bottle over my burnt body. I peaked into my father’s bedroom, a Bob Hope special on TV.
“Pop? You awake?”
Mumble, mumble.
“I’m dropping my Rutgers course.”
Mumble, mumble.
I closed his door and waddled into my bedroom. I could still withdraw with some refund. I was declaring my independence. While not a free spirit like Terry, I could at least be free for the summer.
Copyright © 2025 by Barbara Krasner
