Last summer on July 4, I was parked in a fold-up chair sitting
on the edge of a golf course in Arizona.
We had just finished moving my mom down to her retirement home
near Phoenix and her mom, and we were relaxing in the cool,
95-degree air (Hey, after the temperatures get up in the 110-plus
degree range, 95 isn’t so bad).
Last summer on July 4, I was parked in a fold-up chair sitting on the edge of a golf course in Arizona.
We had just finished moving my mom down to her retirement home near Phoenix and her mom, and we were relaxing in the cool, 95-degree air (Hey, after the temperatures get up in the 110-plus degree range, 95 isn’t so bad).
But what made this July 4 different from any other I had spent was who I was with.
Instead of the same childhood friends I usually spent my Fourth of July with, either camping out or sitting on a car and watching the fireworks show that takes place at the community baseball/soccer fields each year, I was hanging out with about 20 senior citizens – all friends of my grandmother.
As the local fireworks show began, I couldn’t help but listen in and smile as one older gentleman – he must have been 75 or 80 years old or more – told the woman next to him, “That one was nifty.”
Nifty … now that’s a term I don’t hear every day. It made me laugh, but at the same time hearing it made me realize just how the fireworks, the watermelon and the ice cream we share all take us back to the most vivid of memories.
I’m sure almost every one of us could say, with barely any thought, where they were on the Fourth of July on any year of their life. How many of us, young or old, can remember as kid running around with sparklers and writing our names in the air on an invisible piece of paper, with the trails of bright light etching the words on our eyes so we could see them even with after our eyes had closed? How about the back yards, with the nice, cool grass, the smell of the grill and the shouts of delight from the neighborhood kids as parents lit showing cones and fountains?
One year, back before almost every type of firework became illegal to light in the dry summers of Colorado, I remember my uncle and my dad filling up an entire truck bed with fireworks, and we lit off handfuls of mini-tanks, screaming cones and piles of bottle rockets, one of which almost took the head off of my neighbor. It was a little dangerous, of course, but the red, white and blue sparks and the American flags lining the houses in our neighborhood that always stood out to me.
For years, before Denver had its own major league baseball team, we also had the privilege of watching the USA baseball team play against Cuba at Mile High Stadium and watch the fireworks after. Again, more hot dogs and, if we were good, cotton candy, too.
To me, while the Fourth of July means Independence Day, the day our country became free, it will always mean more than that. It will mean family, friends, food, glitter and memories that will never wash away, whether I’m driving up to the mountains with my best friend in high school after seeing the city’s fireworks display (six years ago) or working that night covering a fireworks show for a Colorado newspaper (two years ago) or even waking up Fourth of July morning with absolutely no plans or any idea of what I’m doing that evening in a town miles away from my family (this year), I’ll always remember where I was or what I was doing on our Independence Day – and why it was special.
I do know one thing – where ever I end up on Fourth of July this year, I’ll be looking up at the sky as hundreds of rockets burst with color above me and I’m sure one thing will be running through my head: “That one was nifty.”
