I said I wouldn’t have time to post today (again), but I thought I’d just put up a quick post before the subject is too old.
I spoke briefly with my brother on Sunday, and he told me that he was at Lake Hartwell with his family to watch fireworks (he lives in Greenville, and that is apparently somewhere Greenville people go). My reaction was something to the effect of “Better you than me,” and he said it wasn’t his idea; he had just gone along with the inevitable, as dads often do. This led to a brief discussion in which we found we were both, at our now-advanced ages, quite unenchanted by such spectacles.
As I said to him, such displays have little attraction to me as a spectator activity. I enjoyed blowing stuff up as a kid. I can even recall enjoying writing my name in the air with sparklers, as tame as those are.
Remember this picture of our late friend Burl taking pride in one of his early models? It caused me to respond thusly back when I first saw it:
I’m wondering — is that behind your house in Foster Village? I ask because the background looks a lot like the view from my backyard when we lived in that subdivision. We had this unbelievable view of both Pearl Harbor and the Waianae range in the background. (The lots were terraced so that our backyard lawn was higher than the roof of the house behind us, making for an amazing panorama of southwestern Oahu.)
In fact, I’m flashing on a memory here. Unlike Burl, I wasn’t a master builder of models. I didn’t paint the pilot or other small details. I’d put on the decals, of course, but beyond that my finishing touches didn’t extend beyond maybe heating the point of a pin and using it to melt machine-gun holes in the wings and fuselage.
I definitely didn’t bother with details on the little model of a V1 buzz bomb that I test-flew in that backyard in Foster Village. I built it around a firecracker, wedged into the fuselage tightly by wrapping toilet paper around it, and threaded the fuse out through a hole before final gluing. (The V1, a fairly featureless rocket, was way too boring to look at, and there were no more than five or six pieces in the kit — the only thing that made it worth building was to blow it up.)
Then I took it out there, lit the fuse, and threw it. It worked — green plastic blasted everywhere. But it was over so quick, it didn’t seem worth the time it took to build the model, even as simple as it was. So that’s the last time I did that…
Anyway, that sort of thing was cool — for a kid. But the idea of watching someone else’s fireworks go off — especially if I had to fight traffic or get into a crowd to watch it… well, that’s only slightly more enticing than watching someone else play golf. Playing golf is fine. Watching someone else do it is rather mind-numbing.
I did, a few years back, enjoy watching the fireworks over the center of London on New Year’s Eve. But that’s because I was miles away, standing atop Primrose Hill in a park, amid a fairly chill (and not overly large) group of Londoners who had walked there for the same purpose. The fun then was less in the distant fireworks, and more in the novelty of the situation — walking through London in the middle of the night, seeing the other folks arriving from various directions pushing prams and such, and watching the Brits launch those quiet UFOs I wrote about. I had never seen those before. It was all quite pleasant.
But the rest of the time, I find fireworks fairly tiresome — the neighbors setting them off as soon as the sun goes down at certain times of the year (which always makes me glad I no longer have a dog and am forced by such thoughtlessness to try to calm the poor creature down), strangers doing them on the beach when I’m trying to have a nice evening walk there, and so forth. And the idea of driving out of town to watch other people set them off is pretty unthinkable. Although, of course, we do things for kids and grandkids.
So I’m just wondering: Do you like these things? Why? Or why not, for that matter. Your reasons may differ from mine…