Fire in the Sky

Fire in the Sky

It was just this past Saturday night and my wife and I were sitting in our folding chairs overlooking the field where my city shoots off its fireworks. We were watching the firemen and the shooters as they walked around the launch tubes and did mysterious things to the explosives under their care. We had quite a bit of time ahead of us to wait for the show as we'd come early, and I was sitting there thinking. Now when I start thinking, I realize that one of two results will eventually happen. The first one is that I'll probably fall asleep. That's not so bad. Especially this year as I was just starting to get over the flu and a snooze would have been welcome. (Hate that summertime flu!) The second result is that I'll remember some old-time stuff relating to the present circumstances and I'll have the unstoppable urge to share it with kith and kin. (What exactly is a kith?) So prepare yourself. It's time for a trip down memory lane with yours truly.

(Pardon the digressions in parenthesis. It's that kind of day.)

As I sat there at the end of the day contemplating the upcoming show, I came to the realization that people mark their lives by certain events. Birthdays. New Year's Eves. Births. Deaths. Vacations and Holidays. They are the inch and foot marks on the tape measures of our lives. And the passage of time for us humans doesn't go by smoothly and quietly, at least most of the time. It seems to proceed forward in jumps, spurts and twitches – first going by slowly and haltingly, then zipping by like a lightning bolt traveling from earth to sky. (Did you know that's the direction they go?) For instance, the wife and I are planning on taking a much-discussed and much-anticipated vacation next week. The time from “now” to the time we're scheduled to leave is dragging by – it's like our feet are in heavy mud and we just can h-a-r-d-l-y slog ourselves forward. But when the vacation starts? Don't blink your eyes, my friend, or it'll be over! Zip, zip, zip.

Anyhow, I was sitting at the field waiting for the fireworks to start when I started reminiscing about previous year's Independence Day celebrations in my town and how different they were in the past. How much of a difference, I wondered, was caused by time passed and not circumstances? I'll probably never know.

I used to live about five doors south of the local college's football field. I lived there for a number of years while I was a pre-teen, 8-years-old to about 13-years-old. It was a fun place to live when I was young, as most of us kids who used to live in the neighborhood would play up there by the stadium and around the college when we had a chance. Riding our bikes in the summer and our sleds in the winter, playing on the fences (they had wooden ones then, all around the field, with a ledge on the inside you could shimmy along), sneaking into during football games and watching the college players and running up and down the stadium seats when there wasn't a game.

Nobody worried about us and we, for the most part, stayed more-or-less out of trouble. Not always, of course. But let's let those memories stay quiet for the moment. I'm not sure how long the statutes of limitation are in Ohio!

They put on the local fireworks display at that stadium in those days – probably up until the late '70's or so. The crowds had increased by then so much that they had to seek another venue. I remember one year when I was about 10 or 11. Several of us kids had crawled up onto the roof of the ticket booth which served the main gate of the field. We'd procured from somewhere a fake firecracker and a number of feet of real fuse. It was a BIG sucker, too. Looked about like a half-stick of dynamite. We'd stick about 6 inches of fuse in the thing, light it and toss it down into the crowd that was waiting on the fireworks. Then we'd yell, “LOOK OUT!” And point to the huge firecracker laying on the ground who's fuse was fizzing and smoking and crackling. We'd laugh like crazy when the people would run, then one of us'd jump down, retrieve the cracker, climb back up on the ticket booth roof, wait until the crowd reformed and do it all over again.

What marvelous fun!

I would guess that those fireworks shows weren't as elaborate as they are now. Not near as many displays were launched then. But I recall the old fireworks shows as being just fine, none the less. The stadium sat in a bit of a bowl, so the echoes that bounced around multiplied the effects very nicely.

In those days they also had ground displays, something you rarely see now days. Yeah, they were a bit hokey, the “Niagara Falls”, the “Catherine's Wheels”, the red, white and blue “USA” and the faces of Washington and Lincoln. But they elongated the program and gave us all more “bang for the buck”. And, occasionally, they would give us an unexpected thrill.

I remember one year we were sitting in the grandstand watching the show. One of the ground displays was a big wheel whizzing around on a post and shooting off flames of different colors. It would spin and then go “boom”. Then spin some more and go “boom” again. Big booms! All at once that wheel became detached from the pole it was mounted on and commenced rolling toward the grandstand, flaming and hissing! Knowing that there were plenty of booms left on that wheel, you could see the crowd gasp and begin to rise to it's feet – ready to get out of the way, if possible. Fortunately (I guess) it fizzled out halfway across the field and fell over.

I still wonder what would have happened if it had rolled all the way across the field and tried to climb into the grandstand. That would have been a Fourth of July to really remember!

I recall going to the fireworks in 1976. My father had remarried that year (my mother passed in '72) and I, my brothers and my new step-brother and step-sisters attended that celebration all together. There were seven of us, plus a couple spouses by then. My younger brother had mixed up about a gallon of wine cooler and put it in a Thermos jug and we took it along. Most of us became a lot more relaxed than we might have been without the drinks, and the fireworks seemed so much better that year because of it.

So in the late '70's or early '80's they moved the fireworks to our fairgrounds and tried to display them there. It was big dud. There were too many buildings around and they blocked most of the view. Almost anywhere you sat you had an obstructed view. That experiment lasted only a couple of years.

They then moved them to their present location – a huge field in the north end of town that normally contains a couple dozen soccer fields and a marvelous walking track. They now set the launch tubes up in the center of that field and we observers crowd around in a circle a proscribed distance away. The view is unobstructed, you can sit from right up next to the yellow “do not cross” tape, clear back to some parking lots quite a long distance away to watch the display. It all depends on how close you actually want to be. My family's generally been one of the group defined as “the closer the better”. However, my wife and I have discussed this tradition (aberration?) recently and might be willing to forgo the “up front and personal” viewing position for one with a bit more distance between us and the aerial extravaganza. This discussion was initiated the last few years by the amount of ash that's been falling on us during the performances. Some years, when the wind is blowing in our faces, we've actually been covered in ashes by the end of the performance.

That's starting to seem a bit too close for us now.

As I sit here typing this I realize I'm continually amazed at how FAST the Fourth of July seems to arrive each year. It seems that we just see our last bit of snowfall, have a couple weeks of warmer weather and BANG – it's Independence Day! Summer's 1/3 over.

And I barely noticed it starting!

So, boys and girls, another milestone for the year has passed. We can now begin to mark time as before-or-after the fireworks this year. Did I read such-and-such book in June or July this year? Oh – it was before the fireworks so it had to be in June.

And so it goes. The milestones that are way, way, way up ahead through your imaginary windshield are soon dwindling rapidly in your hypothetical rear-view mirror.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone. Hang on to it as long as you can. Labor Day and the Fair will be here before you know it!