Flashback Friday

The Fourth of July is over and done with for another year, but the fireworks stands are still in operation.  I stopped at one last night, just to see if they were having a half-off sale, just like they do on the day after Christmas, but they were still selling them at full price.  As I as driving home, I thought back to the fireworks we had when I was a kid.  I have an unusually detailed memory when it comes to my childhood, but I cannot remember ever seeing any of the fireworks stands like we have today.  You would buy them at the grocery store or drug store.  And the selection was no where near what you can buy legally today.  Back in the day, all we had were sparklers, smoke bombs, lame bottle rockets and the coolest of them all, the snakes.  If you were lucky enough to have friends going on vacation down to Florida, you could slip them a few bucks and ask them to stop in Tennessee to buy the good, illegal fireworks for you.  Oh how we loved the contraband Black Cat firecrackers and Roman candles.   But if you couldn't find someone willing to bring the illegal fireworks back, you had to make do with what you could get locally. 

I guess that bottle rockets are still popular, but I don't know how they fire them off - back in the day, we would use a 16 ounce Coke bottle.  Now that those are extinct, I don't know what they use.  I'm guessing a beer bottle might not be the safest thing to use.   And I'm pretty sure that the small round smoke bombs don't bring kids as much excitement as they did us.  They never did anything except make a big cloud of smoke, but we were fascinated nonetheless.

My personal favorite of the old school fireworks were the snakes.  Once again, you don't hear kids today talking about them like we did back in the day.  Once you lit the small black disc, if you blinked you would miss the disc expanding into the snake.  I think the reason we liked them so much was because we knew our parents hated them so much - they would leave a nasty black stain on the driveway that no amount of spraying with the hose could clean.