. . . the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through
the night,
That my house was still there . . .
And my yard . . .
But not my peace of mind. Okay. My sanity.
Ever since they made the purchase of fireworks legal
in our state, my former favorite 4th of July holiday has become an
explosive event. I’m not just talking about my neighbors and their lack of
thoughtfulness or even their lawlessness. I’m also talking about my reaction to their thoughtlessness.
There’s never been a more bottled up rocket launcher than the emotions I keep
shoving down inside of me during every amateur micro-burst that shakes our
chandelier. I keep doing that because I don’t want anyone to be mad at me. Or
shoot at me. Or take direct aim on my house with their “legal” fireworks.
Okay, because I’m a chicken and it takes a lot to
make the transformation into a mama bear.
Here’s something weird, but very important about
fireworks.
It’s legal to buy them. It’s not legal to shoot them
off in neighborhoods—not aerial missiles, anyway. You know, the colorful,
photogenic kind that terrify everyone’s dogs and cats and leave me with PTSD
until the next pyrotechnic event. So far, those dates include New Year’s Eve
(also no longer my favorite holiday), Halloween (never a favorite holiday), and
random weeknights—just because people bought fireworks half-price the day after a holiday and thought we’d enjoy a
little background noise for no particular reason.
I don’t.
I am, too, a patriot. No, I am not old. I just want
to enjoy fireworks shows in appropriate places, like shopping mall parking lots, city
parks, and Disneyland, where professionals with all three fingers on each hand
control them. Not overhead, six houses from mine.
So I cooked up a plan.
“Next July,” I yelled to my husband above the
commotion of our neighbors’ late night, celebratory explosions, “I don’t want
to be home on the 4th of July. I want to go somewhere else to see
fireworks.”
“But we just got back from going somewhere else to
see fireworks,” he said. “And why are you yelling?”
“Because I don’t want to be home at all on the 4th
next year!”
This is the next year. So we booked a room with
leftover hotel points, dug out all of our Christmas gift cards, and planned
ourselves a date night so our neighbors could spend the evening being obnoxious
and we could spend the evening not caring.
Somebody told them.
On July 2nd, a few preliminary rounds
exploded down the street for about a half an hour. Okay, I thought. That wasn’t
too bad. Ridiculously early, but short.
On July 3rd, one of our neighbors staged
his own production, complete with lights and booms and cheers, for three and a
half hours. I’ll say this for him—it was free. When bedtime rolled around,
though, and the lamp on my side of the bed was still shaking, I lost my cool.
And probably my salvation.
Now, hubby and I have different temperaments. I
married him because he is the epitome of patience. And I usually get mad at him
because he is the epitome of patience. So while I was fuming and losing my mind
over the selfishness of our neighbors—don’t they know there are babies trying
to sleep and people who get up at 4 in the morning every day?—my husband, the
retired firefighter, who, for years, was serenaded to sleep by a symphony of
firefighters and their foundation-shaking snores—really couldn’t have cared
less that the neighbors were committing misdemeanors behind our house.
It took a little honest communication to sort all of
that out. And I’m happy to report that we resolved our differences before
anything other than an innocent neighbor’s backyard went up in flames. It
looked like we’d find the July 4th of our dreams after all.
On Independence Day, we left our house because we
didn’t have the freedom to enjoy any peace there. We headed to our Shangri-la
hideaway in Phoenix, went out for a nice dinner, and returned to our room to
wait for the sun to go down.
Now, listen. Enjoying fireworks in the Valley of the
Sun is almost an oxymoron. The high in Phoenix yesterday, July 4th,
was 109 degrees. That’s the boiling point for frogs and tempers. We’ve tried to
enjoy this holiday a dozen different ways before, but all of them left us with
heat exhaustion and second degree burns. Finally, we discovered the one and
only way to view a good light show in Arizona—from the inside of our air
conditioned truck.
We found the perfect empty parking lot, aimed our
windshield in the direction of the floor show, and sat back for forty minutes
waiting for the big pay off. At ten after nine, we looked first at the dark sky in
front of us, then at each other, and said,
“Where’s the show?”
We’d researched this. We were one mile east of the
park where the big production was supposed to go off, and three miles northeast
of another one the local casino was in charge of. They were late. Both of them.
The next show we knew of was thirty minutes away. If we left now, by the time
we got there we’d be lucky to see the finale. We pulled out our cell phones,
searched Safari, and brought up the unbelievable truth. We were late. Two days late. Both events had gone off without a
hitch on July 2nd.
I blame my neighbors for this.
Since when is the Fourth of July celebrated in its
entirety on the Second and Third of July? Is this a communist plot or a
socialist prank in an election year? Who’s stealing our legal right to
Independence Day? Was it written in the fine print somewhere in Obamacare that
we had no right to find fireworks on Fireworks Day? I wanted answers. I wanted
names.
I wanted people to stop messing around with the
Fourth of July.
We turned around in the empty parking lot and headed
back to our hotel, where on the way we saw eight cars lined up side by side
against an open stretch of desert, in full fireworks viewing posture. Two cute
college girls sat on the back of their open convertible, with John Philip
Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever
blaring from Pandora, while the man in the next car leaned against his vehicle
looking at his cell phone. His wife stood against a wooden barrier, looking
longingly off into the dark night. Everyone was waiting patiently. For
something.
“Honey!” I said in excitement. “That must be where
the show’s going to happen.”
“But it’s after nine,” he said, driving past the
onlookers.
“Maybe it starts at 9:30 instead of 9,” I told him.
“But you looked it up,” he said. “The fireworks blew
up two days ago.”
“Well, eight cars full of people over there think
there’s a show about to start. I’m just one woman with a cell phone. I could be
wrong.”
He sighed. Poor guy. What choice did he have?
He turned around, and we headed back to the
impromptu parking area, where we took the last spot alongside the man with the
cell phone. My husband rolled down his window and asked him,
“Are there fireworks happening here soon?”
“I sure hope so,” the stranger answered.
“Well, we wondered because online it says the show
happened on Saturday.”
Silence. And then .
. .
“Ohmigosh.” He looked up from his cell phone to my husband, staring at him blankly like he’d
just been told there was no Santa Claus.
“You’re right,” he said. “And we’ve been sitting
here in the heat for thirty minutes for nothing.”
We backed out away from our misinformed peeps, and
drove away. I wish I’d taken a picture of that sad group of cars all lined up
side by side. Thirty miles north, like a pinhead of light on the horizon, a
distant fireworks display in a town that still owns a calendar punctuated the
dark to the delight of the blondes in the convertible.
“Yay!” they shouted.
It was all the show any of us got. Some reward for
the only true patriots in the south end of Phoenix.
I’ve got a new plan, though. Next year, we’re not
even going to be in the state for the Second or Third or Fourth of
July. We’re getting out of this stinking desert and going some place green. We’re gonna leave three days
early and find a pretty place with good temperatures and a working calendar.
Then we’re gonna watch fireworks without any early pre-show bologna, and cheer
and eat hot dogs and applaud when the big finale lights up the sky.
“They don’t celebrate the Fourth in Ireland,” my
husband said, when I laid out the plan.
That’s when I finally blew up. Talk about a rocket’s red
glare.
