The Snowflake Chronicles

Memories of the Fourth of July

9 Rahmat 163 B.E. – July 2, 2006 A.D.

I don’t remember my grandparents ever calling it Independence Day, it was always the Fourth of July. We always celebrated by going to grandpa’s and grandma’s trailer house (it was never called a mobile home) on Lake Blackwell. We always grilled, neither grandma nor grandpa ever called it barbequing, hot dogs and hamburgers for lunch and supper (it was never called dinner). For breakfast, my grandmother cooked pancakes (not hotcakes), eggs and bacon in the mobile home’s small kitchen. Then the rest of the day, we would play, ski, ride in my grandfather’s motor boat and eat.

It didn’t matter what day of the week the Fourth fell on. The day before we would pack up the car, hitch the boat to the back and drive to Lake Blackwell. When we arrived, we would unpack, put everything away, put the motor boat into the water and take rides up and down the lake until sunset. At sunset, we would eat and then sit, look up at the stars and talk until bedtime. On the Fourth, we set off fireworks in the evening and went home the next day. It was on a Fourth of July trip to Lake Blackwell that I saw my first UFO, but that’s another entry.

The only time the ritual changed was if the Fourth fell on a Sunday or a Monday. If this occurred, we went to Lake Blackwell on Friday evening and stayed until Tuesday morning. I remember three times when we didn’t go to Lake Blackwell (just outside of Blackwell, Oklahoma), those were the three disastrous years we went to Lake Carl Blackwell (that’s in another part of Oklahoma and it was an all day drive), I’ll make a separate entry about that as well.

Anyway, on the evening of the Fourth of July we set off fireworks. The fireworks we used weren’t the wimpy stuff of today, but real weapons of self-destruction and mutilation. There were bottle rockets, roman candles, cheery bombs, firecrackers, M something or other (can’t remember the number after the M), sparklers, etc. I can remember grandpa sitting on the hood of his car, holding a roman candle while it discharged its rainbow colored blossoms. In fact, once a roman candle backfired as he was holding it, he jumped up and brushed the burning sparks off his shirt. I remember setting off firecrackers, cheery bombs, and bottle rockets. I remember my brothers putting firecrackers in the entrances to red anthills (actually I think we called them ants’ dins), lighting the firecrackers and running away before they exploded. The ants were really pissed off about that.