POSTSCRIPT

postscript JULY/AUGUST 2022 / DONNA MOFFLY

“When smoldering worms of red-hot ash rained down onto the deck, we were out of there fast.” OF FIREWORKS AND FUN

Boom, it’s July! Time for fireworks in celebration of our nation’s independence.

Fireworks have lit up my life for a long, long time—since age six when Charlie Ten, owner of the restaurant where my parents had courted in Cleveland, started inviting our family to Chinatown for their New Year’s festivities. My brothers and I were always thrilled to go home with little red and gold envelopes stuffed with dollar bills.

In my teens, some friends and I got permission to take Tom Bernhardy in his rolling bed up to the roof of Huron Road Hospital to watch the fireworks display going on at the Cleveland Stadium. The Georgetown football player had been paralyzed in a diving accident but never lost his spirit. He sure enjoyed the show and especially the beer we snuck him that night.

As newlyweds, Jack and I were invited to a Fourth of July party by sailing buddy Newbold Smith and his wife, Peggy. Recruited to help set off fireworks, Jack learned the hard way not to put a three-inch rocket in a five-inch launching tube. Peggy’s father, Henry B. duPont (H.B.), who was deaf as a post, wandered the field with rockets exploding head high; and a rack toppled over, sending them streaking down the hill into the crowd. Miraculously, no one was hurt.

On a visit to Canada, my scofflaw husband drove illegal pyrotechnics back across the border tucked inside the blankie little Audrey was holding while she sucked her thumb.

Later, when she and Jen Garb were in grade school, we went on a mother-daughter trip to Chinatown in New York, armed with a detailed shopping list from Audrey’s big brother Jonathan. Phyllis Garb was an old hand at buying fireworks, so we were ready when a man saddled up to us on a street corner, asking if we wanted any. We slipped him the list, some cash and waited nervously for twenty minutes until he showed up with a brown bag bulging with Roman candles, bottle rockets, ladyfingers and bricks of firecrackers.

On a trip West, with me behind the wheel of a Pace Arrow RV, our teenagers could hardly wait for their father to fall asleep with his ulcer so we could stop for fireworks in Utah— sold out of giant silos painted red to look like firecrackers. (Those Mormons don’t smoke or drink but, boy, they love pyrotechnics.) The kids hid them in the shower until we arrived at the R Lazy S Ranch in Wyoming, where clever wranglers talked their young guests into putting on a big show for their parents. Beat trying to smuggle the stuff home on the plane.

In our Riverside neighborhood, we used to have the Willowmere picnic just before the Fourth of July fireworks in Binney Park. The trick was to get back to the keg of leftover beer before the high-school types took off with it.

With the arrival of our sailboat, Purple Tiger, Jack and I started enjoying our town fireworks from the water. Once we dropped the hook beside Calf Island, not realizing that they were being set off right there. When smoldering worms of red-hot ash rained down onto the deck, we were out of there fast.

Sometimes we spent the night rafted with other boats over in Oyster Bay, where a wellheeled gentleman traditionally put on a not-so-private display of fireworks launched out of two barges anchored off his front yard.

No question, Long Island Sound is a great place to marvel at the bursts of color along its coastlines on Independence Day. It’s also peaceful out there in the dark—a good time to reflect on our amazing nation, where it’s been and where it’s going.

That, of course, is what the Fourth of July is all about. Have a happy one!