I love the 4th. In some of my earliest memories I’m waving sparklers on my grandparents’ lawn - watching liquid fire drip off the tip onto the grass; white smoke, nostrils full of sulfer.. Fireworks are threaded through my life, and they have never changed for me. My reactions have changed, but they haven’t: I’ve always seen in them an ideal beauty, with nothing to grasp at or hold on to - no distractions as it were.

I can follow that strand of beauty back, and I see myself falling farther and farther away from it. When I was very young, fireworks simply made me happy. Even though the fireworks were used up, my happiness was secure because life was secure - I was confident of even greater good to come, of more holidays and more fireworks, and nothing had been irrepairably lost or broken.

I used to make fireworks (people often think I’m some pyro nut-job, but that wasn’t really it: who doesn’t want to create the thing they love?), and through that hobby I saw the possibility of change and a foreshadowing of my current position.

One year I put on a show for my cousins, which started well. There were several volcanoes (blue and purple) I was especially proud of. Near the end I set off a whistler. It was a new design, and instead of whistling it exploded - it flew through the air and struck my cousin Whitney’s ankle. She wasn’t injured, but of course it stung and she spent several minutes crying. Even though she was ok, I felt wretched the rest of the day. Here was a thing that seemed entirely beautiful, that had brought me only joy, and in trying to bring that joy to someone else I had brought suffering instead. The very center of things had become missaligned, and fireworks made me sad from then on.

They are still beautiful, and they fade, but now I cry afterwards, because I know some beautiful things pass away and never come back. I think of all the people I’ve hurt and the suffering I’ve caused, all the beauty I’ve destroyed, things I can never undo, and even though God can bring new good out of any evil, still the evil is done and the first good is gone. Of couse I know, as a Christian, that there is hope.. everyone plays “Born in the USA” today, but I always think of a different Springsteen song:

everything dies baby that’s a fact
but maybe everything that dies someday comes back..

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 11:28 am and is filed under Personal Anecdotes, Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.