It’s Independence Day weekend in Ely. The parade route will be a little different this year due to the early sounds of fireworks (blasting) that have been coming from Harvey Street in its state of flux. Most people won’t notice the change. The Fourth is always a celebratory day and for me it always seems to run as the longest day of summer.
Dad, who was a Vietnam vet, never really liked the fireworks. We’d gather when the kids were little for a campfire and an eclectic meal of summer favorites and to light off some of the small stuff that kids love so much. Smoke bombs and wiz poppers and bottle rockets. He was into those things. Not surprisingly they were always my favorites, as the mere smell of a sulfurous smoke bomb or the glow of a sparkler can transport you back fifty years in an instant. Not surprisingly either for me they also always reminded me of Bilbo Baggins’ eleventy-first birthday party.
I would find Dad sitting inside in the dark of the living room while the big stuff was going off outside. I don’t think the rollicking explosions bothered him as much as the lights in the skies themselves reminded him (and took him instantly back 50 years) of the tracers in the night skies a half a world away. The nights were not good on the edges of Qui Non, nor anywhere for our troops over there.
I’ve always liked the anticipatory reveal of a good fireworks show, but every dog I’ve had as an adult is scared to death of the stuff. My cats too. It has become the longest day for me because it is full of sirens, car engines, loud music and crowds, all of which I understand, are just exactly why it is the favorite day of summer for many folks. I’m not ashamed to say, I’m just fine without all that. I’m not complaining, just explaining. It quite often is a day that Ely gets hammered by either a much needed rain or a heck of a thunderstorm. Then, just after it all calms down a bit, it literally explodes.
I begin to understand more and more each year as I’ve come to sit with my pets in the dark what Dad must have felt. And… and I also know what it feels like to be left out of the fun, even if that exile is necessarily self-imposed. He was a quiet man who didn’t mind being alone, but he didn’t need a PTSD reminder dropped in his lap annually either.
Do I have a point? I’m not sure. I think my point is that I care more about my dog and cats than I do about seeing a fireworks show. I’ve seen hundreds of them. I care more about the memory of my dad and what he might have been experiencing all those years when he drove us to watch or sat with us outside for a bit until he disappeared… I don’t know. People are dealing with stuff 365/24/7 and we have no idea, even if we are clued in, because we aren’t them. I guess I think about a lot of stuff there in the dark. Having a pet is normally a calming thing, a stress reliever, and I don’t mind, one night of the year, helping them deal with their stress.
Now, as I ponder this stuff, and my dad isn’t with us anymore, I think most of all that I wish he’d told me about why he didn’t like fireworks. I think I’d like to have known that when I was a kid so that maybe we could have done something else together instead. I wonder if they caused nightmares and I wonder about the nights that the colors in the sky above could be traced back to, just like the tracers that arced above the silhouettes of jungle forest palms. It wasn’t something he wanted to talk about. Was it something I needed to hear? I wonder if I’d told him that 4th of July was o.k. without the finale that he would have had a better week? I don’t know. I was too busy marching in parades in my itchy wool band uniform and hotter than hell hat. I was too busy being worried about what my hair with all my cowlicks was going to look like when said hot hat came off finally. What park a certain girl would be watching the fireworks from. Whether I’d get chiggers again from the grass like I did the year before. I was in my own fantasy world much of the time, dreaming of dragons and adventures and maidens who might rescue me, wizards and orcs and trolls and treasure.
I do know this. That if my parents thought something was important (outside of those realms of fantasy) to me they made sure that it happened. I know that Dad sacrificed his own feelings and yes, fears, for mine and not just on the Fourth of July. And… and I know that what makes the Fourth, Independence Day, so very important to me is the other sacrifices he made on our behalf starting the day his draft card got punched and he became a Military Policeman in Vietnam. I know that the kind of parades we throw now, should have been thrown for him and everyone else that made it home but they got a different sort of non-welcome home parade. I didn’t understand that back then. No wonder he didn’t want to talk about stuff.
I also know that Dad and I used to count the number of Chevrolet vehicles in the parade and if they outnumbered the Fords (hard not to, cause the Fords just as often as not couldn’t make it through the parade) then it was a good parade. Except of course for the Model A’s or Model T’s, those, Dad recounted, were o.k. Jokes, people, calm down Ford owners.
When the bouquets burst above our heads out over Miners Lake and the booms shake the ground under our feet, when white and purple and blue and pink and green shower overhead, it’ll be a glorious sight. It’s the kind of thing that once it starts, you never want it to end. There are only a small amount of those things in life, and they’re all worth waiting for and looking forward to. Now, as always, they’ll pull my eyes up and up to the stars above them where on cool, clear Minnesota nights I often look and think I feel my Father’s gaze returned.
