Light And Run Away

Once again, the gutters and curbs are clogged with debris from our last flurry of pyrotechnics. When I say "our", I refer to the neighborhood in which I live. I took the year off, out of solidarity with those who have been forced from their homes due to the wildfires that continue to rage across Northern California.
But I did think about my history with fireworks, both responsible and otherwise. Mostly otherwise. As a young bachelor, I set off sparkling fountains on my enclosed patio. This was the same apartment that my roommate and I shot pop bottle rockets at one another - inside. I had to give up my much beloved Pep Boys shirt when one of the errant missiles sailed past the intended target and into my dresser drawer. Fortunately for the rest of my laundry, Manny, Moe and Jack were the only victims of that particular conflagration.
Given the range and recklessness of many of our other experiments over time, I am happy to say that all of my fingers and toes remain attached, and I continue to have the highest respect for things that go "boom". Maybe I learned early on, when a friend of mine and I had spent a couple of years collecting the gunpowder from any unexploded or "dud" fireworks in a mayonnaise jar. As another Fourth of July approached, he was invited up to our cabin in the mountains, where we were under very strict instructions not to light any fireworks. But we smuggled that mayonnaise jar up inside of his sleeping bag, and when my mother was busy getting dinner ready, we purloined a book of matches and crept off to the little shack across the creek from the cabin to figure out what we could do with our dangerous cargo.
At first, we made little trails of gunpowder in the dirt, like the ones we had seen on "The Wild, Wild West". We were eleven, and it only took us a few minutes of these controlled demolitions to start wishing for something more significant. I would like to say that I remember whose idea it was to drop a match into the jar that was still more than half full of gunpowder, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter who actually dropped the match, since we were both poised with our heads just a foot or two above the mouth of the jar when it went off. It wasn't an explosion, just a white flash that shot straight up to the roof of the little shack.
When we both got back off our backsides, I noticed that my friend's eyebrows were considerably thinner, and mine must have been too, considering the way he was laughing and pointing. There was nothing left in the jar but smoky residue. Our immediate impulse was to do it again, but we had nothing left. We had literally shot our wad. The mayonnaise jar stayed in the shack, and when we went inside for dinner that night, my mother never mentioned the faint smell of burned hair or our newly manicured brows. My friend and I didn't speak of it again, and we didn't feel bad about missing out on any big firework displays later that night. We had our little show, and we were happy to let another year pass before we lit another fuse.