“Mom, last night was a blast!” said my son as we were driving this morning.
Last night was July 4, 2008. My son and I were headed to Humboldt to set up for a family reunion dinner. We had spent the night before at my aunt and uncle’s farm where he and his brother got to shoot fireworks – real fireworks – for the first time.
My oldest son has had an uneasy relationship with fireworks. He spent the first five years of his life watching our hometown’s celebration from the cab of our truck with his hands over his ears. They were bright. They were loud. He wanted no part of them.
But that was then. Now, he is 10 years old and experienced in the ways of the world. He’d just spent three days at 4-H camp where he fought caterpillars; did KP duty; even danced with a girl. He was ready.
And, to be honest, isn’t shooting off your own personal fireworks on the 4th of July some kind of rite of passage? Really, a person has not truly experienced Independence Day until you’ve felt the adrenalin rush as you run from the spitting fuse of a freshly lit firecracker.
From a purely parental and fiduciary responsible position, shooting off fireworks is really stupid. You spend way too much money purchasing gunpowder dressed up in cardboard tubes with names like “Golden Flower,” “Armageddon,” and “The Hulk.” You wait, until things are really good and dark so that you cannot properly see. And then, surrounded by excited children armed with slow burning sticks, you light fire to these creations and watch the money that you spent blow up into light, smoke and noise.
I wonder, is there a reason they call the sticks “punks?”
But, you do it anyway. You do it because of the light in your child’s eye that has nothing to do with the fire or the evening light. You do it because you remember what it felt like to be 10 on a warm summer night hanging with your family in the starlight. You do it because the next day, you get to drive in the car with your son and hear him say with sincerity that embraces your heart, “Mom, last night was a blast!”
