I was going to write about the debate. But after I saw it, I changed my mind. I don’t know who they thought they were talking to, but they weren’t talking to me.

Then I remembered that this week’s column would be coming out on the Fourth of July. I could tell a most memorable Fourth of July story. Everybody has one – the one Fourth you never forget. Maybe it was because of that first kiss behind a tree, or the time you broke a bone in the three-legged race. Something to make one Fourth of July celebration more memorable than all the rest.

Mine was in 1976. It was the nation’s Bicentennial, so everything was painted in the colors of the flag. Vietnam was finally over except for the millions who could never make it end. After the Nixon-Kissinger years, voting Americans were in the mood for a peanut farmer from southern Georgia and a big Fourth of July parade.

The year before, I had quit my job as a newspaper reporter at the Belleville News Democrat, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, across from St. Louis. My beat was East St. Louis, known for its corruption. One morning I woke to find bullet holes in my car as a warning to keep my nose out of local affairs. I got roughed up in an alley by some young toughs who wanted to get into politics. I won big awards for investigative reporting. I was on my way up. Maybe one day a Pulitzer.

But my plan when I quit college to make my way in the world had not been to become a successful newspaper reporter. That was just something that happened along the way. My plan had been to become a writer.

So one day I up and quit my job, bought a backpack and down bag at an Army surplus store, stashed a notebook and pencil in my pack, stuck out my thumb and took off for the mythical highways of American road lore because it seemed to me like that’s what writers do – they take off; they have lots of adventures and when they get enough of them they get a room in an old hotel by the railroad yards with a table for a typewriter and showers down the hall. They learn that there’s a time to write and a time to write.

That’s why I was in Marquette, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, on the southern shore of Lake Superior, on July 4, 1976. After just six months of hitchhiking around the country -- sleeping under overpasses, a night in a Georgia jail for pissing alongside a county road… things like that -- I figured that I had seen enough and that it was time to put it all down in the novel that would get me a spot on the Johnny Carson show.

Rent at the Janzen Hotel in downtown Marquette was like $14 a week. My third-floor room faced north, looking out over Lake Superior. In the mornings I drank coffee at the café down the street where Stella, the waitress, who wore lots of makeup and had an alcoholic husband, handed out Bible tracts with the check.

Then I would go back to my room and write, clacking away for hours on my old Smith Corona.

At night I drank wine with Depression-era hobos out back on the wobbly fire escape clinging to the old hotel’s stone walls.

Marquette is a college town. I’d gone to college there – Northern Michigan University. Sitting on the Janzen’s front porch bullshitting with my new old-timer buddies, I’d watch young college students lost in thought walking around the downtown streets like I had done when I was a student, in the very same spot, a decade before. I’d notice how they’d glance up at the run-down hotel, probably wondering what kind of people live in a place like that. I wanted to tell them, but they were in a hurry and would have to find out on their own or read my book.

It was a short two-block walk to Main Street where the 1976 Fourth of July parade would pass. It was just like I remembered it from when I was a kid growing up in a small town not far from Marquette in the decades following our parents' war. Nothing was changed. Led by the mayor in an Uncle Sam costume, school bands and veterans in tight fitting uniforms marched by; clowns threw candy to children lining the street; a fire truck crept along, blasting its siren; a float advertising a real estate agency portrayed a vision of the American Dream -- a home with shutters surrounded by a low picket fence, as the reigning high school Homecoming queen waved prettily from the dream’s artificial front lawn. The parade even had pick-ups pulling decorated flatbeds carrying the local Little League champions. I got to do that after my Elks team won the local championship in 1959. Standing there along Main Street in the crowd, it was just like I remembered it, almost like a hallucination.

Before walking back to the Janzen Hotel, my mind took a snapshot of the scene and stored it in a neural file deep within the brain. To retrieve it, I just have to remember the passcode: “MY MOST MEMORABLE FOURTH,” and I’m instantly reminded that some things never change, like the smell of grandma’s kitchen when she was baking bread.