The Fourth of July

I blew $152.76 on fireworks today. That’s a bit more than last year, but not as much as some years past. Like many red-blooded American males, I’m addicted to fireworks. It must be a male thing. My wife, Trish, enjoys my yearly pyrotechnic display, but clearly not as much as me. If I didn’t come home with my yearly hoard, I don’t think it would bother her much.

When my first child, Laura, was born, I couldn’t wait until she was old enough to enjoy a fountain or a sparker. But Laura hated fireworks, one of the major disappointments of my thirties. This situation corrected itself with the birth of my son, Joe. Joe, who accompanied me on my trip to the firework stand, enjoys fireworks as much as me. Maybe even a little more.

My love for fireworks goes back as far as I can remember. Growing up in San Leandro, a small city east of San Francisco, I lived on a block filled with fellow baby-boomer kids. In those days, before the Safety Nazis declared them illegal, Lark Street was lit a bright with fireworks from one end of the block to the other. I remember my father, dressed in his tan kakis and blue jacket, lighting them in the street using a road flare for a punk. Rockets, Roman Candles, spinning wheels, (and a few cherry bombs courtesy of the older neighborhood teenagers), made the night a wonderful thing. Those July 4ths have stuck in my mind all my life.

As a kid I lived and died for firecrackers. There was a man who would appear each year parking his old Buick across 150th Avenue in the unincorporated area that separated San Leandro from it’s neighbor to the south, Hayward. There, with only the county sheriffs to worry about, he would sell fireworks out of his trunk. The good kind. The illegal kind.

For me, Heaven would have been to own a full brick of firecrackers. This would have been impossible of course. I could barely afford the fifteen cents it cost for a single package of Black Cats much less an entire brick! But I could always dream. What wondrous fun I would have with them! A whole myriad of things could be blown up, from backyard plumbs, milk cartons, to tin cans launched into the air. But I made do. Even with only two or three packs in my hand I felt like a king!

Firecrackers were always bought surreptitiously. I was certain my mother, a professional- grade worrier, would be certain I would lose at a finger or God forbid an eye! They were purchased out of the Buick, secreted back to the safety of my room, hidden with as much sly skill as I would with a lid of grass a decade latter.

Somewhere along the line, perhaps when I was eight or nine, most of the “safe and sane” fireworks were banned. The good stuff, the large multi-colored fountains, the spinning Catherine Wheels and much more, were cut from my life. The only thing that survived the carnage were the meek, pale imitations sold each July at the whitewashed Lyons Club booth at the far end of the Safeway parking lot. These fireworks could only impress a four-year-old. For me, it was the end of childhood.

But that would eventually change.

In the mid-90’s, well into my forties, my family and I moved east to the fringes of the Bay Area to a small town named Rio Vista, or as I like to call it, “The Land That Time Forgot.” It’s a place where until just a few years ago the nearest McDonalds was seventeen miles away a road stop called Flag City. Want to buy a pair of shoes? You have to drive at least twenty miles to accomplish that.

But to my joyful astonishment Rio Vista offered something I thought was gone from my life forever. Fireworks. At the end of June each year a stand wondrously appears at the local grocery store parking lot. It doesn’t sell everything, no Roman Candles, bottle rockets or firecrackers, but everything else is there. Everything necessary to bring back a piece of childhood if only for one night a year.

Earlier today I spilled the cache of fireworks onto my kitchen table, carefully liberating each from their packaging, setting free their fuses, readying them for the night ahead. The smell of gunpowder filled my nostrils. What a glorious smell! Someone should make gunpowder aftershave! And there they sit as I write this, waiting for night to fall, the party to begin, and the brief time trip into the 1950’s to occur.

For me, the Fourth of July is magic.


Talk to you later,


David