I giggled during the flag ceremony at Fort McHenry.

Not that I was being disrespectful, but because I was just so taken with the pageantry. You don’t see this kind of thing much anymore.

Let me explain.

Fort McHenry is where Francis Scott Key got the inspiration for “The Star Spangled Banner,” after spending the night as a “guest” on a British ship that was part of the fleet bombarding the fort. “Say,” he asks in the song, “is the American flag still there?” The answer, as we all know (though it’s not in the first verse that we all sing in school) is “yes.” And so a legend was born.

We have many national monuments, national memorials and national sites, but Fort McHenry is our only national historic shrine, and the presentation there is – appropriately enough – a special one. You sit in the visitors center, watch a show about the incidents that led Key to write the anthem in 1814, and then the curtains on the wall pull back and reveal a reproduction of that early flag, still flying above the fort.

It was at the moment when we all stood and were told to face the curtained wall that I chuckled with anticipation. This, I said to myself, was going to be great.

“Stop it,” my sister hissed. “I’m enjoying this.”

“So am I,” I assured her.

Probably not in the way she did, with her direct and un-ironic patriotism, but in my own way. I enjoyed the way myth and ritual worked together and I enjoyed the special efforts that were being taken to make this a moment unlike any other in any other national park. She has been to a few national sites; I have been to a lot, and I recognized this as unique. It was unexpected and I was happy.

In fact, however, when the curtains opened, the flag was not there. For some reason it had been lowered, then got snagged going up, so it was lowered again and – finally – raised at the end of the anthem. The sky was a perfect blue, the wind a perfect carriage, and the flag unfurled. We couldn’t have asked for a better spectacle or a more representative one: human endeavor thwarted, uncertain – “Say, is that flag going to be flying or not?” – but triumphing in the end.

Afterwards we walked under the flag as we explored the fort itself. The fort is historic and was not altogether unrecognizable even after 200 years of service, but I remember very little about the brick walls. They were high but not difficult to climb, and the view of the harbor was spectacular. But always as I walked along the ramparts I was aware of that cloth snapping behind me, slow sometimes but deliberate, a huge banner, and the shadow it casts is gigantic.