The 4th of July --

The fourth of July 1954, I am watching my uncle burn little black tablets that seem to turn into snakes on the big rocks at the end of the walk.  My "trolley car," a shoebox with cellophane covering the cut out windows to make them look like stained glass, waiting.  Tonight my mother will put a candle in it and I will pull it around the block on a string before we light sparklers, but between then and now I will load the caps into my new gun and run around pretending to defend my world until the caps run out. Then I will load the single caps into my cap rocket and throw it at the sidewalk to hear it explode.

The good ole days, the violence that seemed so run of the mill back then.  It was innocent.  It was only tradition.  I also played with baby dolls in the shade of huge trees and walked my baby around the block in an old wicker baby buggy that had belonged to my mother when she was small.  Sometimes I even dressed up in my cowgirl outfit, donned my gun and holster and played with all of it at once!

Later in life we would gather to watch neighbors light flares and giant sparklers on their lawns, but the big fireworks, the ones that mimicked bombs bursting in air, would not appear in my life until I was nearly fourteen.  The Country Club set them off and everyone in the city watched that display with wonder.  I watched through the windows on our staircase landing.

The fourth of July's of my childhood with picnics and popcorn and Sousa marches gradually evolved into the ones of my children's childhood where I banned the guns and the sparklers and we watched the magnificent firework displays from the parking lot of the Pepsi plant while listening to the choreographed music on the radio.

We lost the personal involvement and furor of the fifties, yielding to the both more dangerous and safer commercial displays of the eighties.

Now it has become a point of honor for many to hoard bootlegged fireworks and set them off in the country for wide eyed children who no longer play with cap guns or cap rockets but are in danger of finding real hand guns in their mother's purses or father's cars and the games of the fifties take on bigger consequences.

What will we have learned thirty years from now?