So yesterday, I mused about parades I’d been to since I went to a rather large parade this year. This year, we also had a bit of a fireworks show, of sorts: For the second year in a row, my adult children had some friends over, and they lit off some fireworks. My beautiful wife and I did not watch the show–she because she feared for their safety and me because, like Renaissance festivals, just don’t enchant me any more. Although I’m not sure if fireworks shows ever did; they were just family and communal things we did.
When I was a kid, Smith Park, the terminus of the parade that passed by my grandparents’ house, had a small fireworks show, and we attended it all the time more than once, enough to think it was an annual tradition, but I have no idea how annual it was. Maybe most of my life up until I was seven years old. As I recall, everyone brought blankets, and across the field, the “professionals” lit the fireworks. But it couldn’t have been every year to that point.
Because my father was, for a couple years, one of those “professionals” who had been drinking all day and then went to light fireworks shows over a couple of beers in the night time. He brought us to the shows, the whole family, but instead of us watching on a blanket with the other spectators, we got to watch the show from inside the car by where the “professionals” were. It meant the fireworks were right over us, but this was in the late 1970s, man. I watched parts of more than one show sitting the wrong way on a Chevy Impala bench seat, dangling my head into the foot well. Which was not comfortable even then.
I remember July 4, 1980, though. My mother was at an inpatient rehab facility, so my father took my brother, me, and Rosemary to a job site to watch the Milwaukee lakefront fireworks. Rosemary was or had been married to Bill, the first of my father’s circle to get divorced (and my father lived in Bill’s basement immediately after getting kicked out by my mother in 1981 for being the philandering sort–oh, yeah, now I get it). At any rate, the spot must have been a great view: It was on a sloping roof three floors up. Just the place to take an eight-year-old and a six-year-old for fireworks (although I guess it was not us he was trying to impress). Do I remember anything of the fireworks? No, but I do remember being terrified of falling off the roof.
In Missouri, after the move, we really didn’t go to fireworks shows–my mother was not one to go out after work–but in the trailer park, we managed to get some firecrackers, bottle rockets, ladyfingers, jumping jacks, and other spinning ground things, so that was our fireworks shows in the trailer years.
I went to the lakefront fireworks show once or twice in high school or college, but after college, I’m not sure I have gone to see fireworks since.
After we moved to Nogglestead, we had a clear view of the Battlefield city fireworks, except the ground effects, for a couple of years until the untended fence line across the road turned into an untended row of trees. For a couple of years, neighbors on the next farm road to our west put on shows, maybe even competing against one another, so we got a really nice display there.
In 2019, we spent the night in Poplar Bluff, and my nephew and nephew-by-marriage-by marriage (my brother’s wife’s daughter’s husband) drank, doped, lit off fireworks, and set a bad example for my boys.
One year, I bought some fireworks–the kind I bought in the trailer years–and I realized those are fireworks that are fun to shoot off, but not fun to watch. The next year, I got some of the rockets that burst and whatnot. Eventually, I let my sons light some fireworks themselves once they were teenagers–and they had a blast, literally, even though I made them wear safety glasses. And, in the years since, they’ve taken over their own fireworking. They did it on their own two years ago. Last year, a couple friends from their Lutheran school days came over, and it was the same this year. Enough for them to think every year when it will have been only a couple of times.
But I got to see a couple of the fireworks from the deck, directly overhead. And when my youngest came into the house to secure soft drinks for everyone, I was pleased to see he was wearing safety glasses.
