I just adore fireworks. There's something about the combination of loud, booming sounds and sudden, brilliant colors against a dark sky that is just thrilling and awe-inspiring to me. I always see something different, I'm always hoping for more and bigger, and I'm always disappointed just a little when the show ends.
I've never been to a large city's fireworks show...Boston, New York, etc., although I've seen them on TV. I can appreciate the magnitude of the show and the symphony playing in time with the fireworks is an amazing thing. But it's better in person, when you're sitting on a blanket under the open sky, and dazzling blooms of fire open up right over your head.
From the time I was really small my sister and I had the luck of having a local fireworks show happen every year in the park right across the street from my grandparents' house. Every year we'd set up our blanket between the trees, staking out a great spot and rubbing in the bug repellent, and yelling with delight at each boom and flash of light. These days you need a chair, and you need to aggressively defend your stretch of sidewalk or you're liable to get a car trying to park in front of you and cut off your view. The park fills to overflowing with excited families and vendors selling garishly blinking necklaces and toys. But even these kid-attracting bits of flashing plastic pale under the extravagant colors and noise of the fireworks show. They've even started playing John Philips Sousa marches during the show now, which adds even more fun as far as I'm concerned. I love a good loud marching song, but they're odd and out of place unless you're in a big parade, or watching fireworks. Then it's so perfect I practically get goosebumps.
I haven't always been able to make it to local fireworks shows when I haven't been back East. But when I can hear the thumps of the blasts going off I'm liable to run from window to window, or out of the house into the street, looking for the colored fire in the sky.
As a teenager I spent a few Independence Days on the beach with my father and other "adults", setting off illegal fireworks. We had to be careful the police beach patrol didn't catch us in the act; one year the owner of said fireworks, (a huge amount of them too) spent weeks wiring all of them with slow match to large plywood boards. At zero hour the three boards were hustled out to the beach, just above the waterline, set down, and one end was lit. Oh the cops showed up pretty quickly alright, but what they found was a series of fireworks wired together and a bunch of cheering and hollering adults standing well back enjoying the show. No one in the act, no one to arrest.
We didn't always plan it so well. One year, absorbed with lighting off buzz-bombs (a personal favorite), my father and I were unaware of the beach patrol walking right up behind us. Oops. I had the lighting stick in my hand, and then a flashlight in my face, but they didn't arrest me ( I think I looked too young to bother with), they arrested my father right in front of me. They even slapped him in handcuffs, which was interesting to a seventeen-year-old who had never seen an arrest up close. My stepmother was not pleased at having to bail him out of jail, but my father and I giggled like idiots over it later. What we learned from that was: do not alert said beach patrol by "testing" a ginormous string of firecrackers longer than most people are tall in broad daylight before the main event. It tells them where to come looking at dusk later.
I have instilled a love of fireworks into my kids. They yell and cheer for the biggest blasts and groan with disappointment when it's over. Last year they got to sit in the same place I used to when I was a kid; across the street in grandma's yard. This year we're far from my family on the East Coast and we'll be watching the local show. But I know we'll all be doing the same thing, miles apart. Enjoying the tattooing of the evening sky with fire, celebrating our freedom.
Happy Independence Day.
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