But I Live in the Suburbs!!

Happy Fourth of July! I know, I know, I'm a little late. It sounds a lot better than saying Happy Fifth of July. I wanted to celebrate with friends and family and not get into trouble for sitting at the computer. But mostly it was to spend time with the family. Also, had I written yesterday I would not have been able to tell you all about the exciting time we all had right here in downtown Newark.

We live in a town that has banned fireworks in a most spectacular way. We used to be able to have the typical "Safe and Sane" fireworks that could be sold to just about anyone who had cash. I remember riding my bike to the various stands around town with pocket change and walking away with a small bag of incendiary treasures. Smoke bombs, piccolo Petes, Ground bloom flowers, sparklers that seemed to be as long as your arm and on metal rods that glowed red when they were done, and enough snakes to fill an auditorium to the brim with lighter than air ash. My friends and I would use all of these up before we got anywhere near the fourth. And then we would all go over to the lake and watch the display put on by the city on the night of the fourth. It was fairly easy to get hold of "the other" kind of fireworks and everyone "knew a guy" who had them for sale. For the sake of my kids reading this...I never purchased, handled, saw, knew about, altered, redesigned, blew up, or otherwise experimented with any of "those" kinds of fireworks. (If you believe that, I am selling a rather nice Atlantic oceanfront bungalow in Nevada!) In reality, I am really lucky that all of my friends and I didn't get nicknames like, Lefty, Fingers, and The Recently Deceased. It was a different time.

At the end of this entry I will tell you about my favorite back-east story involving fireworks and, yes, an uncle.

Well our town and all of its fireworks seemed to be getting along well and making huge amounts of money for any organization who wanted to run a booth. And then our mayor's lawn got a little scorched by an illegal bottle rocket. His solution? Ban legal fireworks. But he sold the idea to the city by saying, "We still do a wonderful job of entertaining the entire city with our celebration at the lake." Everybody bought it. I was mad. I saw the writing on wall. And then it happened. It took a couple more years but it happened. The city decided that too many people were coming to the lake and it was unsafe to continue having the show. So now we live in the darkest spot of land in the California on July 4th. I am sure there are more factors involved but this is what it looked like to an interested citizen. If I seem a bit bitter about how this all happened, you have marvelous reading comprehension skills.

So now we risk life and limb to travel to the next city over to light fireworks at my mother-in-law's house, or like this year, a friend's house. Even though I wholeheartedly disagree with our city's decision to ban all fireworks I am vehemently opposed to Fremontonians going over to Newark's parking lots to light fireworks and then leave a mess. We always manage to find somewhere to burn a hundred dollars worth of gun powder in a legal way. (It's probably about four dollars worth of gun powder that is repackaged into a box labeled a hundred dollars.) Last night was no exception. Sylvia's mom is out of town in Germany so we got the opportunity to accept a long standing 4th of July invitation to our friends' house. A good time was had by all.

Our friends bought fireworks, we bought fireworks, and then they had surprise guests come visit...and guess what? They brought fireworks too! At this little get-together we had three times (I almost said thrice to impress the would-be publishers but who am I trying to kid) our normal amount of sparkly things. Even with our unusual overabundance we paled in comparison to the groups down the street. We noticed them right away. While we were watching various colors of sparks spew out in perfectly sedate and serene displays...safe and sane you could say...the neighbors were the epitome of dumb and dangerous. In the middle of a neighborhood, and seemingly through trees, this group was shooting off aerial displays that lasted long enough for the police to get there. In fact the police were on this street constantly last night. Once they took a cache of fireworks from the group nearest us, that caused their party to end.

The group further down the road did not go gently into that good night. They had boxes set up in the middle of the road and if cars came down the street they would flag them to stop with a flashlight so they could light their minutes long displays. The last car they stopped with their flashlight was an unmarked police car. Dun dun dun dunnnnnnnnnn. (or dum dum dum DUMMMMMMMMMB) It was a beautiful display but it was punctuated by flashing patrol car lights, and then yelling. And then there were more flashing lights. More yelling. Even more flashing lights. Even more yelling. Now the police were blocking the street with more than just a flashlight. More yelling. SHOTGUNS! Check please. All told there were 13 police cars and too many shotguns to count trying to get these belligerent ding-a-lings to give up the fireworks and go back into the house. Thirty minutes later they decided that the police had had enough fun and went back inside. We continued to set off our mini ooh and tiny ahh producing fountains well into the night.

When all we had left was a smoldering pile of spent cylinders and the kids had gone to play inside Bob and I started to clean up the street in front of his house. From down the street we hear, (forgive the language) "I'm gonna kill you bitch! I'm gonna kill you brother! I'm gonna KILL you mother [Teresa]!!" (I do have limits). Bob says, "GUN GUN GUN call 911" and I ran into the house to call 911. Never mind that this family has phones everywhere! Decorative Ma Bell looking things hanging in the kitchen. Since I didn't know how to hold the earpiece to my ear, put my mouth to the cone on the wall, and turn the crank on the side to reach 911, I kept looking. This was my first time calling 911 from a house and I am hoping it will be my last. We stayed inside quite a bit after that and finally got home around midnight. Needless to say it was an adrenaline laden night.

Now about my uncle and his attempt to entertain us when we were kids in Kentucky. My uncle is a rather oversized child who took full advantage of the anything goes fireworks sales back there. He had bottlerockets that would have carried Buzz Lightyear into orbit, but he also decided that the kids should be able to do some of the tiny bottlerockets too. If you have never seen them, they look like tiny little paper tubes that are stuck to spindly little sticks of wood. Picture half of a skinny cigarette taped to a long sliver of wood...with a fuse. The stick is to guide it (sort of) up after placing it in a bottle as a launch pad, thus the name. Another important part of the design is to place them in the bottle one at a time!

After shooting all of the big ones over the dry lake bed it was getting a little tedious for my uncle while we shot off our little things one at a time. He took a single package of our little ones and said, "Watch this!" The little ones come 12 to a pack all wrapped together in a bundle with the sticks wrapped together at the bottom. It looks like it was designed to be set into a bottle all at once. Looks like but isn't!

Well my uncle unwrapped the top so they were loose and left the bottom together so the would all fit into the bottle together. He then turned up his Bic lighter so the flame was as high as it would go. He held it sideways and s l o w l y moved along the fuses to light them all at the same time. The problem arose when the little slivers the bottlerockets were tied to burned faster than the fuses. All 12 of the projectile explosives hit the ground, without their guiding sticks, with lit fuses. I personally didn't know that my family could move that fast, and I also figured that I would probably fit under a car but I hadn't tested it...yet. It was fifteen seconds of bedlam while all twelve of these crazy devices shot out and exploded all around our whole family. My immediate family was unscathed. My uncle? Oh, Lefty's just fine.