"We're tired of your phony fireworks." - The One True Shatner, Star Trek

A batch of Black Cats in Fairbanks.

We’d planned on taking a bit of a vacation this week to visit The Mrs.’ family. We had planned to sneak out of Texas, and drive to the Midwest to see an old-fashioned Fourth of July fireworks show. Up where The Mrs. originally hails from, you can buy decent fireworks, in that apparently the Mothers Against Fun have yet to get them banned in this locale. My threshold for decent is pretty low, since where I grew up, bottle rockets, fire crackers, and anything more threatening than a sparkler was banned (watch out, you could get a tiny burn from a sparkler).

I grew up in the mountains in a touristy part of the world, and tourists would bring in contraband fireworks that were so potent that your typical Winnebago with Texas license plates had more destructive power than the entire Bolivian military. My guess is that’s still the case – I imagine most Texans travel with a fifty caliber machine gun in the back of the fifth wheel.

Often, they brought in the big mortar shells, and would put on truly amazing (and utterly illegal) Independence Day displays that I would watch from my backyard. Now, there is nothing, nothing more envious than a fourteen year old boy watching people play with explosives and not being able to do so himself. All boys like destruction. On the rare occasion I could get my hands on fireworks, they immediately made their way into a model car or some other thing I’d like to see explode, and pretty soon I’d happily see a red 1964 Jaguar that I’d spent four hours cutting, assembling, gluing and painting reduced to a puddle of twisted and burning melted plastic.

So, when I first visited my in-laws on the Fourth of July a decade ago, I found that I could purchase actual fireworks, along with actual mortar shells. I was transported back to being that fourteen year old watching fireworks from afar – now it was my turn. I would tell you that as I lit the fuse on the mortar shell that I’ve grown up, and didn’t take raw animal enjoyment from the resulting explosion. But that would be a lie. My only regret is that I couldn’t figure out how to make the explosions bigger.

I was looking forward to that again this year. But, no. There happen to be floods of historical proportions going on in the Midwest this week, so, I’m not even sure we could get out of Texas without a submarine. Oh, sure, people everywhere are suffering due to the massive damage, but this is about me not getting to play with fireworks.

The Mrs. is worried sick about her parents being cut off from all manner of things civilized amid a tide of rising floodwater, but I just don’t see her priorities. I can’t play with fireworks this weekend. Which do you think bothers her more?

No. It’s her parents. I’m not sure I’ll ever understand that woman.