Not All Fireworks Have To Be Lit

The Old Man is taking it a little easy today.  Between the heat and the gun battle going on in my back, it's an inside kind of day.  Productive output isn't on the schedule.  Retrospection is.  I've been visited by images of how the Fourth of July was when I was in my "Opie years".

The plant where my father worked closed down for the week of July 4th.  This ensured that all got a week of vacation in the summer time.  We did very little traveling when I was small; most trips were visits to family in other towns.  I think I recall going to the ocean only 2 times with my mom and dad.  Dad was happy to putter in his garden and Mom was happy just to have Dad and me.  But on the Fourth, patriotic adrenaline kicked in and our house rocked.

Unless we had rain, there was always a trip to The Lake.  Its official name was something like Bedford County Park & Lake, or such.  No one ever within my earshot ever called it that....it was simply, "The Lake".

Mom would pack a huge picnic basket with cheese sandwiches, potted meat sandwiches, deviled eggs, and pickles.  Dad would ice down some Pepsi Colas and maybe a Grapette or two in the old red metal cooler, and off we'd go.   We would set up camp over under the trees you can see at the far left end of the "beach".


As the afternoon slid by, we'd manage to empty both the basket and the cooler and it was time to head in, because in just a few hours the "piece de resistance" in a kid's summer life would begin.  Fireworks!
We'd walk up to the high school, go around to the back where the football field was, and find us a seat on the concrete bleachers.  The Chinese invented fireworks thousands of years ago and I can't recall the technology advancing much in all those years in Bedford.  It was pretty much the same show every year, ending with a pyrotechnic American flag  hissing and sizzling from the goal post at one end of the field.


A nice walk home would cap off the evening....Mom & Dad strolling and me bouncing around like the Road Runner.  
I do remember one particular year though that the strolling stopped and it became an every-man-for-himself dash. About half way home, the potted meat and the deviled eggs began to do the boogie-woogie in Mom's nether regions with predictable results.  Every step brought a report.  Then Mom got tickled and the reports increased in both frequency and volume.  What had started as sniper fire became an AK-47.  By this time, Dad was five yards ahead of her, saying under his breath to me, "Come on, come on".  That second round of "fireworks" entertained me far more than the first.   When we got to our front porch, Mom and Dad were hysterical.  Me....I was just happy that there wasn't a "Grand Finale".


I think I've got a couple of firecrackers around here somewhere.  I just might have to send up a tribute.