Sparkle and Fade

I used to look forward to the 4th of July all year long.  It came second only to Disneyland on my top ten list.  And not because of the food, or because my parents had the day off,  or because of parades or ball games or grand displays of pyrotechnics, or any of that.  We didn’t really do any of that stuff, our family.  Or if we did, I don’t remember it.

Instead, every year, my dad would take us to one of the rinky plywood firework stands that sprouted up everywhere, overnight, along the side of the road, and he’d help us pick out $25 or $35 or $45 dollars worth of fireworks, big sets of stuff that came in plastic wrapped cardboard boxes and had names like “Showering Pheonix” or “Blazing Betty”, and then he’d add a few packages of sparklers and some roman candles to the top of the stack, and pay for our Fourth of July.

We’d start asking if it was dark enough at about four o’clock, and it seemed like it never was, as though it never would be, as though the night would never ever arrive, but eventually my dad would say “Ok.  Now.” and we’d set everything up on the curb, right outside of our big suburban house, in the middle of the subdivision, and then for twenty minutes or a half an hour, we’d choose fireworks, and he’d set them at a safe distance, light them, and run away, and we’d stand back, in awe, and watch sparks and colored flames shoot skywards and then fizzle to an end, or write our names in circles with sparklers, or lean in intently as layers of a chinese pagoda smoked and popped up out of a small cardboard box, and I’d wonder if it was the kind of thing you could save.

It seems strange now, an odd ritual.  Why were we on the curb, in the driveway, on the street in the middle of our neighborhood?  Ordinarily, we never hung out on the front sidewalk.  Why didn’t we ever go to fireworks shows?  Mr. E and I have never set off our own fireworks, nothing more than sparklers, although we usually try to track down a fireworks show sometime on the weekend of the Fourth.  I can’t imagine we’d stand on the sidewalk in our front yard shooting off roman candles in the middle of our neighborhood.

And yet.  While it’s always fun to sit on a blanket in the dark now, to ooh and awe over million dollar fireworks shows, to guess at the grand finale or laugh at the bad country soundtrack someone chose,  it isn’t magic.  Magic for me was a $30 cardboard box full of fireworks, when I was a kid, standing on the curb with my dad, in the dark, watching showers of sparks climb towards the sky.