For the second year in a row, the July 4th holiday came a week after terrible thunderstorms and tornados tore through our neighborhood. Winds over 50 miles per hour drove rain sideways, tore shingles off roofs and through windshields, and pulled massive trees and electrical poles to the ground. A road sign near Menard’s was bent to lie flat against the ground.

The sounds of tearing trunks and shattered glass still haunt dreams. 

Lawns throughout our neighborhood are full of dead limbs and broken branches, dried by the summer sun. Many are already chopped and prepped for firewood. All of this kindling ready to combust at a stray spark.

And my neighbors started lighting fireworks off around noon. Like there’s anything to see in the daytime.

*

It was around the 4th, but it wasn’t the 4th itself, just a Saturday night. We were in our first apartment together in Midland, Michigan. I’d be getting up at 5:30 the next morning to assist at the 8:00 service in Saginaw. It was years before private fireworks were legal there.

I laid in bed for an hour as bang after bang went off out our window.  It was well beyond reasonable.

Storming down the stairs, I found a dozen or so people, clearly an extended family, right next to the building, setting those suckers off. I asked as nicely as I could muster.

“Please stop. It’s been an hour and I have to get up early.”

They looked at each other by the light of the truck they had pointing at them like a campfire.

“This is our only time together,” the matriarch replied.

“Then go somewhere else,” I suggested, knowing there isn’t really somewhere else. 

“This is our 4th,” she reiterated. 

“This is also my home. And you are disturbing me and the hundreds of people around here.”

I went inside and called the property manager. They told me I was the third person to call and the police had already been notified.

*

We want to imagine our world is full of singular, private rights. A right to own things. Use them. Absolutely. And it may be intoxicating to think of all property that way. A right to headphones, a mountain bike, or chicken nuggets. Purchased, possessed, all of it: property.

But it isn’t all private. And it is delusional to treat fireworks like a mountain bike. Or to believe that possession and use are such totally different things. Parsing these out only serves to evade aligning these with our values.

*

We were visiting Jeff’s family in Albion over the 4th. Jeff and I were outraged that we would exist on a Fourth of July without going to see a fireworks display. Our two families were out all day, squished into one car. I don’t know how we got 6 people into four-door sedan. Because I don’t remember being uncomfortable.

I do remember the newspaper they were using to find the fireworks in neighboring cities. And the one that looked promising. We pulled up to a sandy berm by the side of the road, imagining the warm sand sprawling out below. As the two dads got out, Jeff and I unbuckled, preparing to race behind them. “We’re going to check it out first,” my Dad said.

They were gone forever.

When they returned, my dad started the car and prepared to pull out. “Why can’t we watch the fireworks?” I asked, knowing our only chance to see them had already disappeared.

“It’s a bunch of drunk people throwing fireworks at each other.”

There are few things my dad has ever said to me that crystalized so clearly that they remain, a sculpture of a timeless moment. It could be any moment.

*

Fireworks are the defiition of public spectacle. They aren’t a personal privilege, right, or even responsibility. Lighting one off in a neighborhood, on the beach, or even the seeming middle of nowhere is a public act.

Sound and light travel. They aren’t contained by the imaginary property lines or held behind fences. The idea of fireworks as private property ends when they are set off precisely because they aren’t private. 

Really, the concept of private property ends before that moment. Because the mere threat of lighting them off can have a chilling effect. 

*

Rose and I went to Bay View Park. I think it was less rocky then, more beachy. Or maybe I just wanted it to be. It was never a place we could swim. But it was where I had most of my childhood fireworks experiences—just a couple blocks from the house.  

Our daughter was barely two. She liked the colors, just not the sounds. We covered her ears with our hands. We thought we should do this. What’s the Fourth without fireworks?

It felt like people were on top of each other. Spreading a blanket out meant that was the limit of your real estate—there wouldn’t be more. We settled in, desperate to offer this treat to our daughter. The grand public display by professionals—the controlled predictability allows for relaxed awe.

It wasn’t 90 seconds later before a family five feet away were sending up rockets. Fireworks were legalized in Michigan the year before. And it wasn’t like people didn’t have them, but Indiana was over five hours away. It took work to get them up here.

Rocket after rocket went up. None straight up. Some disturbingly low and into the crowd.

Ten feet to their right, someone else was offering theirs to the crowd. More and more unveiled their own. Children ran among them, with sparklers—then trading them in for snappers that they threw at each other.

There was nothing relaxing or fun about this place. A sight of serene joy for many years of my childhood was out of control.

We packed up our blanket and water bottles and left the park as the first real fireworks shot up into the sky.

*

It was on one of those drives I made from Lansing to Midland before seminary. Before kids and marriage and the other hallmarks of adulthood. Those drives when I was reestablishing residency in one place and Rose was living in another.

And I knew I was missing something. I had outgrown fireworks and didn’t care for them anymore. They felt juvenile and wasteful. Of value to the people who watch them. A danger to the people who launch them—like the classmate who missed a bunch of school when a firework burned his arm and face.

And yet it was the Fourth. And as I drove the backroads of central Michigan, laid out like a grid, I saw some fireworks going up. Real ones. We were too far from Midland to see theirs. And Alma and Mt. Pleasant were in the wrong direction. 

After a minute I pulled to the side of the road and watched. Just for a few minutes. These controlled colored explosions glittered the sky, accompanied seconds later by a POP. I sat alone in my car, listening to The All American Rejects and wishing there was someone next to me to see them too.