Light and Run Away

It has started. My son, now eight years old, has been asking me since dawn when we could shoot off some fireworks. It's a gene that hasn't been weeded out yet. Pyrotechicmania runs very deep in my family. I still get a little glazed look when I see a sign that says "Fireworks - 3 Miles."
Growing up in the foothills of Colorado, I understood the inherent danger of all fireworks. Smokey was pointing directly at me when he said "Only YOU can prevent forest fires." I have vivid memories of the film strips and glossy color photos the fire department showed us of mangled fingers and limbs - "a cherry bomb did that." What I was thinking, of course, was "Wow - if it could do that to a kid's hand, think what it could do to a model of the USS Enterprise."
I learned some of my initial demolition skills from my father: how to blow a peanut can out of a coffee can half-filled with water, how to twist fuses together to maximize your firepower. Still, most of the summers I spent growing up were in the middle of a national forest, so we tended to play down the rockets' red glare.
When my older brother got his driver's license, we would take periodic road trips to Cheyenne, Wyoming. There, just across the border from Colorado, you could buy all kinds of sordid and dangerous things. We'd throw around twenty or thirty dollars and come home with a couple of grocery bags full of sulfur and gunpowder. Once I got my own car, my friends and I took turns throughout high school making the run to Wyoming. There was an old guy who worked one of the bigger stands who described each item thus: "Shoots up in the air, emits a shower of sparks, report." The report was what we were after - the bang. The bigger the bang the better.
During college I was still making my occasional trips to reload. On one of these excursions we found something we couldn't live without: Festival Balls. These were miniature versions of the mortar shells used in professional fireworks displays. It came with a cardboard mortar and six shells. Only the most admirable restraint kept us from coming straight home and setting them all off.
Now a quick diversion: When I was in college, I believed that the damage deposit you paid on an apartment was the amount of damage you expected to do to the place you were living during the course of your lease. With that mindset, we occasionally shot pop bottle rockets indoors. We had cone sparklers on our enclosed patio. We lived a little close to the edge. That being said, it should come as no surprise that after the initial firing of the Festival Ball mortar, we set ourselves to thinking, "What would happen if we didn't use the tube?" The answer came as the flaming ball shot across the street under a car and made a very colorful display beneath it - without igniting the gas tank.
Last year I drove my family across the desert southwest. We were on our way out of Nevada when I saw the sign: "Last Chance for Fireworks." My jaw went slack as I glazed over and headed directly for the converted semi-truck trailer with its faded Black Cat signs. I knew we were headed to Colorado - my mother's house - so I disciplined myself to some very basic purchases. That Fourth of July, a new generation of Cavens learned to light and run away.