The Bell Curve:

On the afternoon of the Fourth of July, I will celebrate two birthdays. My own and the birth of our country. I will perform this rite at a band concert, just as I did as a small boy as far back as I can remember.

There was a modest band shell in a public park in Decatur, Ind. My father played a sometime trombone in the band, and my uncle gave a patriotic speech called “Our Flag” — the same one every year. I tolerated the speech but loved the band music and never missed the concert until I found myself in the U.S. Navy, and a war was taking place.

After that war, there was a long drought of band music in my life until a decade ago when my wife and I were invited to spend the Fourth of July holidays with dear friends in the wooded hills of North Carolina that surround the town of Brevard and provide a setting every summer for the Brevard Music Center.

Nestled in the midst of this island of music is a magnificent band shell where the artists in residence perform almost daily. And on the Fourth of July, the program will be band music right out of the shell from my boyhood.

The shell and the band and the audience have grown immensely, and if there were to be a speech, it would probably pay tribute to the Confederate States of America. But the star remains the same.

His name is John Philip Sousa, and his marches — full of fire and brimstone — will make up much of the program. And integrated with that music will be a celebration of the American armed services that turns a lot of us sophisticates in the audience to jelly — and will assuredly again this year.

In this exercise the band will play the songs most associated with each branch of the military service and as it segues from one branch to the next, the men and women who served in each will be asked to stand. And we do.

For just a handful of minutes all the passions and commitments and tragedies of the 1940s surface in a world so patently different that our war seems to have taken place on another planet.

That is not to say that the changes have been either universally good or bad, just drastically different. And I watch the diminishing numbers of my generation standing and wonder how many who fought in succeeding wars choose not to stand as a small protest against wars in which Americans should not have been asked to put their lives on the line. Like Vietnam. And Iraq.

I can’t put myself in the heads of other generations any more than they can be in mine.

There were so many frayed American households and mixed feelings, for example, in which World War II veterans had to watch their sons — unwilling either to go to jail or leave the country — being sent off to Vietnam. In that world and the world of Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan, the stirring marches of John Philip Sousa seem oddly out of sync, rather as if they are trying to regenerate the enthusiasm once connected with soldiers and sailors firmly rooted in patriotism and the determination and courage to defend the freedoms we have gained and protected in our long history.

So if “Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue” is truly missing today, what does patriotism mean in this new world where Sousa marches are anthems of another time?

We will take this question home with us after the concert, And we will sit on a screened porch in the tops of nearby trees, savoring a martini — straight up, two olives — and wondering aloud if patriotism today must encompass the world to have any relevance.

And, if so, do all such questions have to be run through an international strainer before being weighed domestically? And for all these reasons, is John Philip Sousa’s music uncool?

Only after we pledge a fight to the death to protect that music as shadows begin to fall will we sit down to a wonderfully unhealthy dinner of crispy chicken, floured and deep-fried, accompanied by a thick gravy for the mashed potatoes and a white cake deliberately off center because that happened accidentally on my first birthday cake in this home and I’ve requested it every year since. Can’t imagine a better gift. Or a more patriotic one.

We live these visits a day at a time, just as we gear our lives. For the rest of this visit, we will talk about the past, but we won’t wallow in it. We will talk about making plane reservations early for next year’s band concert and about the fragile sainthood of Barack Obama and the fine book our host wrote while struggling with health problems that would have defeated a lesser man than this tough Marine.

And then we will carry Sousa’s music back home with us, walking with a lighter step when it plays in our head. And we will remember to stand when the music is ours.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.