I write things.
Hey, read this thing I wrote. Its a sort of accidental essay about the 4th of July and my childhood. Come on, it promises explosives, rural Kansas rednecks, football fields and much much more!
I remember the 4th of July in Kansas when I was a kid. I always felt out of place. One of the cousins more than four times my age would gather up all of the kids, their own kids and nieces and nephews, and as the last of Pinky’s grandchildren, I was always included. It was intended that I be raised to believe that these second cousins were actually the firsts and their parents, my actual cousins were nothing more than their parents, distant aunts and uncles, yet I was still supposed to feel very close to some of them, and I was supposed to be just like another one of my aunt Imogene’s grandchildren, but also always be aware that I was special because I was, in fact, the last of Pinky’s grandchildren. It’s al pretty fucked up and complicated and there’s obviously a hole or two in the logic somewhere, but these things happen in families where the matriarch gives birth semi-regularly from age 19 until 42. It didn’t make matters much better that these kids all saw each other, I imagined, something like every day after school (although that wasn’t quite accurate) here in rural southern Kansas, and I was this city kid who surfaced only two or three times a year from Texas. I didn’t play hockey or basketball, I didn’t want to hold the chickens, so I didn’t really feel like running around the back yard trying to catch them, I didn’t know the words to the biggest country hit in the nation, and I didn’t think the creek down the street was all that interesting. Go ahead. Call the 8-year-old me a snob. I was different and they all knew it.
Anyway, sometimes my cousin Randy (if he could be bothered, but he made it clear on the 4th of July that as Fire Marshall of Ark City, Kansas, he was a very important man and could be very busy tonight, although I don’t think that actually fighting fires is the Fire Marshall’s job), but more likely his brother Tim, would load all of us kids up in the back of a pick-up truck (God bless my redneck family) and drive us to a fireworks stand in the middle of nowhere, probably actually northern Oklahoma, run as a fund raiser for local cheerleaders or boy scouts or academic decathalon.
Scratch that. I’m sure there was no academic decathalon around these parts.
There were nine of us in all (Jon, Jeremy, Jamie, Jana, Amber, Adam, Mindy, Sara, and me), but Sara, the youngest was usually left out of these trips. It would be hard for Tim, a non-custodial parent, to keep track of a 4-year-old among nine kids and minor explosives, so she usually threw a screaming fit as we left, was coaxed into watching cartoons, then resumed the fit upon our return.
So we would go buy god knows how many dollars worth of black cats and bottle rockets and sparklers and popper and Chinese whatever the fuck they were and then we’d drive out to a dirt road somewhere and set a few off, then save the rest for after dark. See, besides being this strange non-cousin, the thing that made these excursions especially traumatizing was that I hate fucking explosives. I’m scared shitless of fire (and heights and bugs and boys who just want to bone me; blame my mother: “Don’t stand on that chair, you’ll fall and snap your neck.”) To this day, I still think that the main reason I smoke is the dangerous rush I get from holding a lighter a cigarette’s distance from my face. And the thing that you may or may not realized about white, rural, lower middle-class boys between the ages of about ten and sixteen is that their favorite thing in the whole world to do is blow shit up. And this applies to all of them, without fail. So for these almost-cousins of mine, the 4th of July was a liscence to go wild. And my pre-pubescent self nearly pissed her pants all night long.
Mostly I liked the Poppers: little plastic champagne bottles where you pulled a string and there was a loud POP! (hence the name) and some tiny streamers and confetti would fly out, and those things, maybe also called Poppers, that you thre on the ground and they sounded like a gunshot. Those were wild. I sort of liked the sparklers, but only if my dad was near by to snatch them out of my hand if my eyes started to bug to far out of my head.
Once it was dark, and after we’d all had our red, white, and blue Jell-O, the whole family would walk a few blocks over to the high school football field to watch the big fireworks display. Everyone would Oooh and Aahhh and someone would tune a radio to some station apparently broadcasting the official music for the show, which was mostly vaguely patriotic country music. There was one particular song that I will always remember because it became apparent that every elementary school or Sunday school class in the Midwest was teaching the lyrics to this song in Sign Language, because Mindy, Jamie, and Jana always huddled together and signed the whole thing. There was a line in this song’s chorus that stated, “I’ll proudly STAND UP next to you,” presumably about the American flag or something, and all of them would suddenly stand up on the bleachers in unison, probably holding hands, and all of the moms and aunts and grandmothers would smile and clap and comment on how cute they were. My city private school did not teach the country music sign language, and I did not go to Sunday school, so once again, I was the odd man out.
As the years wore on, the 4th became less structured. We quit walking to the high school and settled for setting up lawn chairs in the church parking lot across the street. Relatives quit showing up. Jon was estranged for a few years, then resurfaced with a baby but no wife. Amber went to pharmacy school, then married a cop. Jeremy managed to cram a 2-year Associates degree into five or six. Mindy had to ride in a parade with the other cheerleaders. Adam joined the Army and did two tours of Iraq, forced against his will to set off real world versions of the tiny explosives that he was so gung ho for as a child in the name of a country that the girls were so proud to stand up for but never actually had to. He doesn’t really celebrate the 4th anymore.
Eventually, my parents and I quite making a special trip for the 4th. I sort of realized that it wasn’t the important family togetherness holiday that everyone had made it out to be. Quite frankly, I was a little pissed that I had been forced to ride around in the backs of all of those pick-ups. But I suppose that without all of theses traumatizing experiences, none of us would have any memories. That’s what childhood is for.
I remember the 4th of July in Kansas when I was a kid. I always felt out of place. One of the cousins more than four times my age would gather up all of the kids, their own kids and nieces and nephews, and as the last of Pinky’s grandchildren, I was always included. It was intended that I be raised to believe that these second cousins were actually the firsts and their parents, my actual cousins were nothing more than their parents, distant aunts and uncles, yet I was still supposed to feel very close to some of them, and I was supposed to be just like another one of my aunt Imogene’s grandchildren, but also always be aware that I was special because I was, in fact, the last of Pinky’s grandchildren. It’s al pretty fucked up and complicated and there’s obviously a hole or two in the logic somewhere, but these things happen in families where the matriarch gives birth semi-regularly from age 19 until 42. It didn’t make matters much better that these kids all saw each other, I imagined, something like every day after school (although that wasn’t quite accurate) here in rural southern Kansas, and I was this city kid who surfaced only two or three times a year from Texas. I didn’t play hockey or basketball, I didn’t want to hold the chickens, so I didn’t really feel like running around the back yard trying to catch them, I didn’t know the words to the biggest country hit in the nation, and I didn’t think the creek down the street was all that interesting. Go ahead. Call the 8-year-old me a snob. I was different and they all knew it.
Anyway, sometimes my cousin Randy (if he could be bothered, but he made it clear on the 4th of July that as Fire Marshall of Ark City, Kansas, he was a very important man and could be very busy tonight, although I don’t think that actually fighting fires is the Fire Marshall’s job), but more likely his brother Tim, would load all of us kids up in the back of a pick-up truck (God bless my redneck family) and drive us to a fireworks stand in the middle of nowhere, probably actually northern Oklahoma, run as a fund raiser for local cheerleaders or boy scouts or academic decathalon.
Scratch that. I’m sure there was no academic decathalon around these parts.
There were nine of us in all (Jon, Jeremy, Jamie, Jana, Amber, Adam, Mindy, Sara, and me), but Sara, the youngest was usually left out of these trips. It would be hard for Tim, a non-custodial parent, to keep track of a 4-year-old among nine kids and minor explosives, so she usually threw a screaming fit as we left, was coaxed into watching cartoons, then resumed the fit upon our return.
So we would go buy god knows how many dollars worth of black cats and bottle rockets and sparklers and popper and Chinese whatever the fuck they were and then we’d drive out to a dirt road somewhere and set a few off, then save the rest for after dark. See, besides being this strange non-cousin, the thing that made these excursions especially traumatizing was that I hate fucking explosives. I’m scared shitless of fire (and heights and bugs and boys who just want to bone me; blame my mother: “Don’t stand on that chair, you’ll fall and snap your neck.”) To this day, I still think that the main reason I smoke is the dangerous rush I get from holding a lighter a cigarette’s distance from my face. And the thing that you may or may not realized about white, rural, lower middle-class boys between the ages of about ten and sixteen is that their favorite thing in the whole world to do is blow shit up. And this applies to all of them, without fail. So for these almost-cousins of mine, the 4th of July was a liscence to go wild. And my pre-pubescent self nearly pissed her pants all night long.
Mostly I liked the Poppers: little plastic champagne bottles where you pulled a string and there was a loud POP! (hence the name) and some tiny streamers and confetti would fly out, and those things, maybe also called Poppers, that you thre on the ground and they sounded like a gunshot. Those were wild. I sort of liked the sparklers, but only if my dad was near by to snatch them out of my hand if my eyes started to bug to far out of my head.
Once it was dark, and after we’d all had our red, white, and blue Jell-O, the whole family would walk a few blocks over to the high school football field to watch the big fireworks display. Everyone would Oooh and Aahhh and someone would tune a radio to some station apparently broadcasting the official music for the show, which was mostly vaguely patriotic country music. There was one particular song that I will always remember because it became apparent that every elementary school or Sunday school class in the Midwest was teaching the lyrics to this song in Sign Language, because Mindy, Jamie, and Jana always huddled together and signed the whole thing. There was a line in this song’s chorus that stated, “I’ll proudly STAND UP next to you,” presumably about the American flag or something, and all of them would suddenly stand up on the bleachers in unison, probably holding hands, and all of the moms and aunts and grandmothers would smile and clap and comment on how cute they were. My city private school did not teach the country music sign language, and I did not go to Sunday school, so once again, I was the odd man out.
As the years wore on, the 4th became less structured. We quit walking to the high school and settled for setting up lawn chairs in the church parking lot across the street. Relatives quit showing up. Jon was estranged for a few years, then resurfaced with a baby but no wife. Amber went to pharmacy school, then married a cop. Jeremy managed to cram a 2-year Associates degree into five or six. Mindy had to ride in a parade with the other cheerleaders. Adam joined the Army and did two tours of Iraq, forced against his will to set off real world versions of the tiny explosives that he was so gung ho for as a child in the name of a country that the girls were so proud to stand up for but never actually had to. He doesn’t really celebrate the 4th anymore.
Eventually, my parents and I quite making a special trip for the 4th. I sort of realized that it wasn’t the important family togetherness holiday that everyone had made it out to be. Quite frankly, I was a little pissed that I had been forced to ride around in the backs of all of those pick-ups. But I suppose that without all of theses traumatizing experiences, none of us would have any memories. That’s what childhood is for.