In a land where frog gigging was not all that uncommon and where fireworks tents added color to the July landscape, my parents were not too keen on firecrackers. Sparklers? Yes. But nothing that exploded. Not even cap guns. But my buddy Tim, who lived a bike ride away on the other side of town, had less restrictive parents. I don't know that we did fireworks at his house every year. And I am puzzled by how two geeky junior high kids arranged any of this given that it was summer time and all we had for crosstown communication were landlines connected to hulking plastic wall-mounted telephones. Somehow we managed.
Tim just posted photos from his most recent July Fourth celebration. It was a very similar backyard to the one in which he and I lit fireworks. I remember his chocolate Lab named Justice being displeased by our pyrotechnics. I remember the satisfying sound and sight of a large coffee can bumping off the turf from a tiny explosion. The concrete pad of his patio was charred and stained by the small smoke bombs. When we were done, there were teeny scraps of paper in little red, white and blue clumps all over the grass. The air was thickened by the humidity and black powder smoke. I recall cicadas sawing out their songs and the enviable lumbering noise of his central air conditioning unit.Since I was the guest and a little bit scared of the punks and fire and so on, my memory was that Tim did most of the lighting of fuses. Not every firecracker exploded as it should and those were opportunities for ingenuity. A couple of times, we joined a dud and an unlit firecracker with the same fuse and sometimes they would rip themselves apart in quick succession. While not especially dangerous, there was enough uncertainty and volume to keep two 13 year olds entertained.
As Tim retrieved one dud, he inspected the fuse end just in time to see that a small glow inside. He flung the firecracker and it exploded in mid-air halfway between us. The detonation was enough to make our ears ring. No fingers torn open, no flesh burned, no lasting evidence of this near miss. However, that brief incident not only gave us our story for the day, but became embedded in our minds.
I didn’t remember this event until I saw Tim’s pictures. I have been around plenty of fireworks since then so it must have been my association of Tim and July Fourth. I wrote a quick comment to his online photos just to see if he shared that memory. He does. He reported that he tells that story every July 4th to his children. And grandchildren. I know that math makes perfectly good sense as the years have rolled by: Tim married young and hurriedly, he later lost his wife in a car accident, and has since re-married and (I’m guessing here) is a trusted physician in the Midwest. But while I so busy doing other stuff, how did my firecracker memory become an annual mini-lecture my boyhood friend now gives to those who can hardly wait to tear open the cellophane and put heat to explosives?
