Independence Day   Before Detroit, before your walkabout in the middle of the middle, before serving the last of your childhood out to strangers, before you forged yourself, more driven by midnight and wheels than by uncompleted California sunsets and my tiresome, bottomless desire -- even before all that, before you left, I was as fuddled as you with questions we never exactly asked, never quite faced, left blurry in fog. But if you meet me in St. Louis, on Independence Day, each of us can put it plain: who were you before, who today, and tomorrow, who?     © Michael Fleming St. Louis, Missouri July 1996