The Marty Minute, Vol. 8
My Fear of Fireworks
Growing up, the 4th of July was holier than Christmas. Flashback 35 years and you’d see me in a star-spangled hat, scrubbing down the plastic lawn chairs (and whining about it), while my family ran around making our backyard magic.
Here’s a short piece I wrote about my fear of fireworks and my family’s 4th of July traditions.
Fireworks
I was so scared of the fireworks at the racetrack. The sky was on fire and it was so beautiful for one solitary second. Then the canopy of sparks fell, and as I watched them I worried they’d hit us all, blooming fires everywhere. The sparks would land on our hair, our shoulders, our boxes of Cracker Jacks.
We’d spent hours watching cars speed around the track. In those cars, my dad, my grandpa, other people’s dads, and grandpas. The knot in me that worried all afternoon about crashes and fires and tires breaking off into the bleachers tightened. No one had died racing, but now I’d sit through another hour of fear waiting for the burning embers.
Why wasn’t anyone else worried about all that fire, raining down from the sky? Why were they smiling and laughing instead of running for cover?
At the age of 4 and 5 and 6 I would scream when the men lit those fireworks off. I’d scream because I didn’t want to burn. I’d scream because I didn’t want to watch everyone else burn.
My grandma knew that I was afraid. My fear embarrassed her. She’d clamp her soft hand over my little-girl mouth. The backs of her rings were smooth and hard and cool and locked against my lips. She’d hold her hand there until it was over. With her hand clamped over my mouth, I knew to sit still. I focused on the pretty sky filled with blooming clouds of gold that spun and swam and blazed across the sigh above the racetrack.
Why did she cover my mouth and not my eyes?
When I was older, 9 or 10 or 12, my dad would buy fireworks, illegal fireworks, from a man at work named Little John. I knew they cost a lot of money, but dad spent freely for the family's 4th of July party. Next to Christmas, it was the most sacred day of the year. A yard full of people, citronella candles lighting up every walkway, bright yellow tubs full of crabs and steamer clams, coolers full of White Rock soda, each can marked with a winged fairy. The promise of the baked beans and kielbasa and pasta salad and brownie sundaes that my mom had spent months readying—the shopping and tracking sales on ice cream and the cooking in big shiny baking tins for days. Betty would arrive first carrying a gallon container bursting with 3-bean salad that no one, not even Betty, would eat. Dad and my brothers had spent the morning running to the ice house to get the huge blocks needed to cool off the soda, the beer, the seafood so fresh we once lost a crab to the woods when he broke free from the tub and skittered away.
Everything was perfect until night fell and the fireworks started.
My dad was clever and a welder, and while mom was readying the food all June, he was in the back garage building rocket launchers out of steel, a pig roasting pit made from an old oil drum, sliced in half and fitted with a motor that spun the soft pink creature around and around and around for hours. There’s a picture of me, standing in that drum, an apple filling my mouth and still, you can see me smiling at the fun, at the preparation, at the promise of the party day.
I keep losing the thread here, losing the thread on the fireworks and how much they scared me even deeper than racetrack fireworks. Here, the people on fire? My family, my friends, my grandpa and Long John and Betty and Ruth, and whatever best friends I had at the time. I imagined my brothers with their fingers blown to bits, my dad, his bald head ablaze from a misdirected roman candle.
Yes, I was even afraid of the baby fireworks. The bottle rockets and the roman candles and the apple jacks. Sparklers were fine, but sparklers were fleeting impotent magic that could burn the tips of your fingers right off.
And here, in my backyard, I was terrified that the police would come and cart my dad off to prison for putting on such a show. For risking his life, for risking his sons’ fingers, for risking that the sparks would rain down on the yard and the house, and burn everything into a fine dead powder.
I wanted to live. I wanted my house to stand. I wanted my mom not to worry about dad, in jail, eating bologna sandwiches, and sleeping on a cot.
In the middle of the party, I would complain to my mom or my friends or whoever would listen. I’d try to keep my voice calm, soft, adult. “These fireworks. They are so dangerous, right?” but everyone would laugh it off. They all loved the fireworks. They didn’t see anything more than the show in the sky, bright streaks of glittering blue and purple and silver and gold. The bright whine of the bottle rockets headed over the street, through the trees, into the farmland across the street or the neighbor’s backyard.
When I was older and braver and emboldened by the local news stories of deaths and blindings by fireworks, I’d sit in the house during the fireworks with the phone pressed against my ear. I would dial 9 and hold my breath. And then 1 and then hold my breath. And then I waited and waited for the inevitable screams and gore that would follow when my dad picked up a ‘dud” only to have it go off in his hand. Skin and bone and blood.
I waited and waited, sitting on the arm of the battered brown leatherette recliner, the curly black phone cord dangling near my star-spangled shoes. The TV was turned onto the Macy’s fireworks, safely miles and miles and miles away in NYC, a whole expressway away from us, safely set-off over water (but dangerously close to the bridge). I could watch them on TV without screaming. I could bop my head to the Sousa soundtrack, the glittering sky, the fishies—so much bigger there than they were at the race track—filling up the sky with chaos and sparkles and light.
If you dial just two numbers into a phone, after a short while it stops waiting for the next number. It gives up.
I didn’t give up. 9-1-wait. Again and again and again for at least an hour.
And then, the end. A pause, like the sound it makes when your microwave popcorn is done.
My stomach unknotted. It was over. For now. Until next year. No screams. No fires. Not this time.
I knew what came next, the ice cream, the brownies, the guests leaving, the promise of a night swim with just my family, a second dinner without the demands of guests. More baked beans and all those citronella candles left just for us. Mom and dad and me and my two brothers. The fireworks gone from the sky, gone from the plastic garbage bag in the air-conditioned bedroom where my dad kept them. Sometimes he’d hold back an M80 or two but I’d run out of space for worrying. Bathing suit on, I’d leap into the pool, into the dark, the most unafraid I could possibly be.
x Rachel