I should go out and honk the horn, It's Independence Day

Speaking of the Fourth of July...

I think the most fun I had at a family fireworks display was the day after we got married in 1986. We were all over at my sister Kim's house. Ed had bought a large assortment of fireworks. I'm not one for dragging things out. We set them all up in a big tightly packed group, lit off one and let the spark shower light the others. It was great fun.

When I was a kid, one of our backyard neighbors was a very large lot that had some greenhouses near us and beyond that there was some land that was au naturel. Of course in the summer around Fourth of July it was mostly tallish dried weeds. Being young pyrotechnically savvy boys we liked to buy "Piccolo Pete's" (a small firework that made a lot of noise). If you took some pliers to the end of the fuel mix and squeezed it good the thing would blow up at the end of its whistling. A couple of times we took these, removed the base, attached them to a stick and made bottle rockets out of them. Real bottle rockets and firecrackers were illegal. Once one of these flew into that neighboring lot into the dry weedy area. I think it was only by divine intervention and much earnest prayer that we didn't start a fire.

My first Fourth in Italy was not without some poignancy. Of course we had to work and of course the Italians had no idea it was Independence Day. At the end of our Day about 9:30pm the four of us Elders stood and sang the National Anthem, all verses (the last verse is the best). The neighbors must have thought we were nuts.