Flashback Friday

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, and to most people here in the 'Ville and elsewhere, that means only one thing -- not the day we celebrate Independance Day in our country, but fireworks. I don't mean to sound like a stick-in-the-mud, but the older I get, the more I could care less about fireworks.

As a kid, fireworks rocked. I loved sparklers and the cool black snakes that my parents hated because they left a big black stain on the driveawy. Back in the day, you could only get the good fireworks (re: fireworks that exploded or shot out) down in Tennessee. So whenever friends or neighbors would go on vacation, we'd always ask them to bring us back a few bricks of Black Cat firecrackers and some Roman candles. They were always happy to oblige. As soon as it would start to get dark on July 4, all of the neighbors would congregate usually in our backyard (since it was the most spacious) and everybody would bring their fireworks and pool them together for one big fireworks display. You could always count on a couple of neighbors bringing their old school wooden ice cream churns and we'd have homemade ice cream.

Now, I could not care less. Neighbors still shoot off the fireworks, but they buy them just a few miles away across the river in southern Indiana. And they start shooting them off a few days before the Fourth, and don't stop until a few days after. Needless to say I'm not looking forward to tonight and tomorrow night; at about 10:00 tonight it will sound like you're in the middle of the war zone in Afghanistan.

I don't mean to sound like an old fogey - I guess I 'd feel differently if I had kids who were into fireworks. But right now to me, it's just money literally blown away. I'd rather take the cash I'd peel for fireworks and buy myself something tangible. Hmmmm. I think I'll run up to the store right now and do just that.