On Fireworks

No nitty-gritty work today: too much cooking, which I guess for me is what the Fourth of July is about for now. Pecan sticky buns, lobster rolls, avocado and white peach salad over greens, potato salad with hard-boiled eggs and cornichons, baked beans cooked on the grill with wood chips, bratwurst in a beer, butter and grilled onion bath, blueberry pie with thick whipped cream. From the garden? Chives, tarragon, parsley, oregano, onions, baby peppers, baby zucchini, the blueberries, the greens. Relevance factor? Zero.

I know I need to get to work, but everybody went to sleep, although they all seemed pretty well-rested and chipper, and I am sitting here by the window feeling groggy and itchy, thanks to my part-time gig yesterday as a mosquito feeding trough. When they first went upstairs, one by one, I was lying on the couch with one of my 365 unread New Yorkers over my face, shielding it--my face--from the light. My father had spent most of the evening trying to get around the fact that we don't have cable by willing the television to show the Red Sox game he wanted to watch. When he finally gave up and made his unceremonious departure--the last to leave--he left the television on.

Fireworks celebrations in New York and DC, with appearances and introductions by grade B celebrities and pans of the ooing and ahing crowd. Personally, I have always thought there was something off, really misguided, about fireworks on TV. After all, the whole point of fireworks is their immediacy. Seeing them reproduced on the small screen, with control over the volume, makes me think of the tourists at museums taking video footage of the paintings. What's the point? Or so I've always thought.

And still do, but somehow tonight as I peered out from under my New Yorker face hat to see the display--I don't think they could make stars the last time I saw fireworks--I felt at the very least a kind of good nostalgia, a little spark of joy, pun intended, all the way. Possibly my nostalgia was exacerbated by the fact that the fireworks were accompanied by a Jerry Lee Lewis concert (I thought he was dead, said Ben, echoing the thoughts of tens of thousand of Americans around the country, I suspect), as well as orchestral performances of Fats Domino and Chuck Berry numbers.

But I also started thinking about how in this age of insta-communication, social networking sites, downloadable photos, texting, movies on demand and on and on and on, there is something inescapably simplistic about fireworks. In spite of those tricky little stars, they really can't be much improved. In other words, fireworks are what they are. There can be more of them, in more colors, and they can be shot up in the sky for shorter or longer periods of time, and they can be simpler or more elaborate, but at essence, they are what they are.

It's kind of like a sandwich. You can put a slice of fois gras between two pieces of fine brioche, but it's still a sandwich. This makes me happy. Fireworks can't be digitalized (although apparently the way they are they set off can be, and is, but this doesn't affect the results). They can't be "enhanced" or "streamlined." I suspect for generations they will continue, alternately, to delight and terrorize small children, provide a romantic backdrop for teenagers ripe with summer vacation, and fill sleepy, otherwise distracted, bug-bitten adults with a flashback to summers before, just a little needed jolt before closing down the joint.