This is a tough time to celebrate 4th of July. I feel so much sadness wrapped up in Independence Day, I don’t think I have to get in to the why’s and all that. In July, 2020 continues to be a hard year. Instead I will say that as a teenager I used to wish I was a firework. I’m not sure why, but I’m fairly sure the idea came from Hunter S. Thompson, somehow…
After a small amount of googling I found that Hunter S. Thompson passed away in 2005 and his ashes were shot off in fireworks, so it tracks that the idea was definitely his. Obviously the whole cremated in fireworks thing is pretty good, but I wanted to BE fireworks. I wanted to EXPLODE, I wanted to BOOM, I wanted to bring light and color to a dark and still night filled with crickets and fireflies.
I remember once when I was young, a friend of the family put on a fireworks show in the backyard at my aunt’s house. I lay on my back in the damp grass on that hot summer night and felt the booms reverberating through my chest like an alien heartbeat. Like a whole world out there had suddenly gotten inside. Like a solar system of crackling light. Like the quote in The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett:
“One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands out and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one’s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun–which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with the millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone’s eyes.”
I hope you feel as if you’ll live forever.
