It is twilight on the flat expanse of grass at Tinicum Park in Erwinna. I am listening to a July 4 pops concert that would otherwise put me to sleep, but I’m having too much fun watching the crowd: the kids wearing glow sticks … around their heads, their arms, their legs, or waving them for a strobe-like effect. The red-white-and-blue-ness in shirts, dresses, hats, and hair. The energy of the families spread out on this vast lawn is building, in anticipation of the 1812 Overture and the salute of fireworks that will provide the accompaniment.
Wispy clouds are stretched against a sky of deepening blue after days – weeks – of rain. The evening is just about perfect. (The cigar smoke is a minor dampener.) I am remembering that two years ago on this day I watched fireworks while perched on a curb in suburban Detroit, oohing and aahing as the starbursts rose above a golf course. It was three days before my best friend got married. Three years before that, I saw the bursts of flaming color in the distance, from a camp nestled in the Four Corners area of Colorado, where the night chilled to the upper 30s and I could see my breath. In July!
Growing up, I watched a much more modest display from a parking lot laid down over a former farm field once owned by Harry Truman. My father never liked fireworks – the crackles and blasts were reminders of a war he was lucky enough to return from. This year, I am celebrating a moment of peace amid the economic turmoil that is 2009.