The UnHappy Fourth

The fireworks were nice. They were.

As they went off I looked around in the dark at all the upturned faces that looked so happy and reverent and I wondered why mine was so...Unhappy.

I think holidays get harder every year that passes. I remember being little, and watching the fireworks with this sense of awe, waving a little flag with this brightly burning patriotism that must have shown through my skin. I watched my Mom, turning different firework colors in the dark, looking subtly amused. I watched Fred, who kept riling up the dog and then claiming she was riled up because of the fireworks. I watched the other people in the culdesac...

None of them looked sad.

I asked later what Mom and Fred were thinking about, watching the fireworks. Fred said the dog, surprise surprise. Mom said the colors, and the shapes they made, and how people must have struggled so hard back in 1776 to make this a country. How hard it must have been for them. What they fought for.

That's what I think all the other people ever watching fireworks must thinking about. I'm assuming, I know. I think people think great thoughts about everything, and sometimes I think I must be lagging around in the dust, compared to them.

I thought... I guess about the fireworks. The shapes, and the colors; how the happy face ones that Roswell likes to buy never get shot off right and the smiley face ends up upside down, or sideways. I thought about what my film teacher said Tuesday about the German filmmakers who fled the Nazi regime to come to Hollywood, bringing with them fresh skills and expressionism (which led to film noir), and how when my teacher was almost done speaking about the immigrants he bitterly slipped in a quip about how these people believed in the American Dream, and how America doesn't want to share that with anyone anymore. I thought about over fishing in Alaska and if there's going to be anything left of the environment in fifty years. The price of oil at the end of summer and the water powered cars they have in Greenland (or is it Iceland?). I thought about how there doesn't ever seem to be peace in the Middle East, and how I don't think our current tactics there are working, but that I can't seem to come up with a better plan myself. I thought about what the Founders would think of the country today, and what that reenactor at the Pickett's Mill site would think of the Fourth himself, since he proclaims himself a Son of the South, and how his beloved Confederate States (that we all still live in, to hear him talk) were invaded by a foreign power a hundred and fifty years ago.

I looked at all the other happy faces, and I wanted to feel happy myself. I wanted to be just as happy, to burn brightly, like the colors of the fireworks. Instead I feel like I'm trying to solve a lot of complicated, simple problems, and not coming up with any good answers.

But I did enjoy the colors, especially the silver ones that explode with the sound of rice crispies and hang in the air like so much twinkling silver confetti.

Happy Fourth, and a Good Night.