This is the first year I've ever celebrated the 4th of July outside of the Great U.S. of A.. It's been a huge celebration for me each year as my birthday comes just after on the 5th. Seven million years ago my mother missed one of these for me, going into the hospital late that night and giving birth to me at 9 a.m. the following morning. How come we don't celebrate our mothers on our birthday?
Sometime in my youth I realized that nobody wants to party on the 5th (because they're all partied out from the 4th) and since then have combined my birthday with the Nation's. It's partly out of convenience and partly out of vanity because it's damn cool to pretend that the whole country is celebrating your birthday.
When my mom was married to my stepfather he used to go wacky, ordering 600 dollars worth of illegal fireworks from Utah. Illegal, in Colorado, meant "anything that went up in the air and went 'boom'". Once we drove six hours to Wyoming as a family but after twelve hours straight in the car together my mom said never again. I think she hoped to calm his crazy, but that didn't stop him. The fourth was an ordeal.
For him it was never about me, but I enjoyed his celebrations just the same. He invited the entire neighborhood and I invited all my friends. The lawn became a stadium and the long 1970's coffee table in the living room became a staging ground for the evenings display - the illegal's hidden neatly in a box underneath and the legal masking them on top. The kitchen was a buffet. A 10 gallon trash can was filled with water to dispose of hot sulfurous projectiles.
We had everything you could think of buying. Snap pops, black cats, ground worms, tanks and sparklers for the kids, usually reserved for before the darkness fell; Fountains, bottle rockets, roman candles, and pin wheels which were displayed on a board mounted at the end on the lawn. These were often the item of danger, sometimes spinning off the board into the yard, and once attracting the dangerous high of someone's hippy friend Bachtah who thought dancing in front of them would be a pleasure to all of us. That year the cops came into our yard for a stern talking to about fireworks safety.
But it was always the mortars, the chinese spectacle of goodness, that made my heart soar. My stepdad reserved a few for the end of the night, simulating a grand finale. His usually didn't go far enough into the air for some reason, raining down hot sparks onto houses and neighboring yards. He would choose his favorites - the ones that explode into several rainbow colors and then disappeared. The bigger the better.
My favorites were the ones that looked like a weeping willow. They burst into shimmering white drops and dissipated slowly, drooping down toward the earth like a lazy tree being blown in the wind. They left dim sparkles in the sky as they faded, backdrop of shadowy clouds framing them, crackling at the very end. They made a soft "poof", as opposed to the "bang" my stepfather loved so much. These feu d'artifice, as they are called in French, made me smile every time.
In my adolescence, for some reason, I attached a great deal of romanticism to the 4th of July. On the 3rd, when we would drive our clunky old vehicles up the monument and watch the real fireworks display, put on by the fire department (barring the event of a drought and fire hazard), I would lay wrapped in blankets on the roof wishing I was in someones arms. The local country radio station would play "I'm Proud to Be An American" at each years finale and my eyes would tear up. I never could put my finger on why this day - among all the other special days of the year - was so important for me to feel loved.
By now that feeling has faded, but I refuse to spend the holiday alone. To me it will always be a celebration - one for my country, one for my mother, one for me - and I am happy to distract myself with all manner of party planning and cake baking and making the day special. This year I will not see fireworks on my birthday, but my heart is not heavy for that. I miss my family terribly - my beautiful nieces and nephew running wild in the hot sun, huddled exhausted in their parents arms come the actual display; my mom, buzzing in the kitchen and out into the yard, hosting always hosting. We were never for want of anything in her care.
I've spent this week in a haze of work. It's a foreign feeling these days, to be doing something with a real sense of purpose, and I'm not yet used to it. If it weren't the 4th I would work through the weekend, late into the nights. This important holiday can't be put on hold though (the work will be there when I get back). I've organized a weekend of simple pleasures with the people who stand currently as my Paris family. Light shopping with Toady today, followed by dinner at le Petit Prince and drinks with the girls at Mama Shelter. Tomorrow a skirt to sew in warm chocolate satin, and then a day at the park eating and drinking and enjoying the most beautiful park in Paris.
No fireworks. Just love. To me that is a fair trade.
