I hope you all had a safe and happy weekend.

My apologies that life intervened and turned this Sunday Read into a Monday Read.

This week, America turned 250. Whether you celebrated, protested, or went about your business, the milestone was unavoidable. Most of us who live here hold complicated feelings about this country — I certainly do. And it's striking how many people, across every political divide, share the same lament: that we're headed in the wrong direction, that the country isn't what it was, isn't what it could be.

But here at The Mayfly we give history a perhaps undue reverence, and I believe our history offers a reason to take heart.

What is distinctive about the American story is that it is a long, cyclic struggle of integration — diverse peoples, ideas, and cultures, repeatedly thrown together and faced with the work of coexistence, only to get it mostly wrong, and then, in some smaller way, getting it partly right. It is a painful, awkward, even brutal process. The tally never seems to add up to forward progress in the moment. But looking back, we find we have somehow come a long way. In all our glory and all our disgrace, we have lived this cycle again and again for 250 years. It's remarkable to consider.

So in lieu of my usual Sunday letter, I'll ask you to read one from another Pittsburgh writer, Fran Tunno, whose mother — the daughter of Italian immigrants — was born on the Fourth of July, 1913, and never stopped believing the holiday was held partly in her honor. It's a simple, classic immigration story, but in it beats the still-living heart of the American experiment: a woman whose greatest pride was her place in a country where we are always trying to figure out how to be something together. I appreciated the faith Fran was willing to share, and I think you will too. It's good company for the week ahead.

John

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John Conrad