Here comes the Fourth of July, with fireworks and waving flags and this year, of course, an inevitable flood tide of patriotic oratory. In past years, New Yorkers passed the day at the beach, or at backyard barbecues, or in the green oasis of a ballpark. They didn't pay much attention to the oratory.

This year might be different, but I doubt it. After Sept. 11, the city blossomed with a public display of red-white-and-blue patriotism that was the most vivid in living memory. In many ways, it was thrilling, a spontaneous affirmation of unity. But the performance of patriotism didn't last long. It couldn't, for this is New York.

Today, we see scattered flags hanging from building sites, their bright colors grayed by weather. Posters turn yellow in store windows. There aren't as many American flag pins in New York lapels. Trucks and taxis once festooned with flags have settled for commercial decals. That spontaneous eruption of public patriotism after Sept. 11 has faded.

This is not to say that New Yorkers don't love their country. Of course they do. It just has never been our style to blather away about an emotion as mysterious as love. Words and symbols are as transient as Valentine's Day chocolates — true emotion must be lived, day after day after day. In New York, the deepest emotions are lived without pasting a heart on one's sleeve.

Patriotic reticence is encoded in the city's DNA, and surely dates back to the 1840s. On July 4 in those days, every manner of political blackguard would stand in public places, call for silence from the brass band, and bellow about his love for his country. On July 5, he'd go back to looting the municipal treasury. New Yorkers of all origins and classes remembered these scoundrels or heard about them soon after arrival, and by the time I was a boy, skepticism had become embedded in the New York style.

A Core of Reserve

That style (which is not limited to New Yorkers) has a built-in reserve, based on the need for privacy in a city packed with millions of people. We know that if a man loudly announces his love for his wife, the marriage is almost surely in trouble. We know that if a man talks too tough, he has a wormy core of cowardice. The same goes for loving your city or your country.

You show love for a place by living in it, by staying when others flee in panic or disgust. You show it by working hard at a job, by raising children equipped with some fundamental notions of decency. You show it by paying your taxes (unlike those sleazy billionaires who sneak their money into offshore havens, after purchasing politicians of both parties with campaign contributions). You show it by what you do, not what you say.

'Under God' Furor

For almost all New Yorkers, their love for their patria — this city, this country — is concrete, not abstract. For many of them, the media eruption last week over the Pledge of Allegiance was absurd. Every American soldier from 1898 to Vietnam grew up reciting the pledge in grammar school without the words "under God." They were inserted in 1954, and without them, the country fielded some pretty tough soldiers and many millions of splendid citizens.

Most New Yorkers aren't big on either "God Bless America" or "The Star-Spangled Banner" either. The first is banal, the second unsingable. When I ask them about their favorite patriotic song, they always answer: "America the Beautiful." You don't even have to be Ray Charles to sing it.

Years ago in Rome, a bitter expatriate asked me if I loved my country, and I said, "Yes." He said, "Give me one good reason why." I said, "Fred Astaire."

I meant that Astaire as an icon epitomized the virtues of a free country, with his grace and elegance, his humor and his ease, and his utter lack of vanity. As a New Yorker, I was also delighted that he took his first dance lessons in the old Opera House on 23rd St. and Eighth Ave., a building erected by a scoundrel. Astaire refined a high popular art that drew on Europe and Africa and made every one of us believe that we could do the same.

I could have offered a thousand other names, from Jackie Robinson to Fiorello LaGuardia. I could have thrown in the Woolworth Building and the Brooklyn Bridge, and added the obvious glories of a free press and a Constitution that permits dissent. But for me, Fred Astaire was (and remains) the best place to start. No other nation could have produced him.

Every New Yorker surely has his or her list of reasons for loving the home place, and many would dismiss mine as dumb or strange. Some among our new arrivals or the hapless young surely might say, "Who is Fred Astaire?"

World of Reasons

Instead, they might list varieties of food, or the treasures in our museums and libraries, or the parochial glories of certain neighborhoods. A few might even feel patriotic because our military can blow any nation on Earth into smithereens. But that's the point. Every one of us can love this country in our own way. No politician can dictate what it means to be an American.

You can be a true American patriot and oppose the hysteria-driven constitutional erosions of the Patriot Act. You can cherish your country and still be infuriated by the illegal imprisonment of "unlawful combatants" who happen to be American citizens. On the Fourth of July, you can join an excited throng and wave flags. Or you can pass a firehouse and quietly say thanks one more time. You can wish a cop a good morning. Or you can rent an old black-and-white movie and don an imaginary top hat and try to dance.