Here on the West Coast, specifically in the Pacific Northwest, the sun has finally set at 9:09pm on Independence Day 2019, and the neighborhood firecrackers are swinging into low gear. The cats, Ella and Tomkin, and I rather wish they wouldn’t: the cats because the snap-crackle-bang frightens them and me for their sakes.
I tried posting a notice on our neighborhood mailbox suggesting a) the noise of random fireworks startles and frightens pets, little kids and some combat veterans, and b) we have a lovely community festival with fireworks, where experts risk their fingers so you don’t have to, that they might attend to hear bigger bangs and see more impressive fireworks.
I frankly don’t think my notices worked. It rained yesterday and they (the notices, not the neighbors), got rather soggy. But then again, it’s quite cool and breezy tonight, and the neighbors may have decided to stay indoors to watch the nation’s celebrations out of the wind. The beer tastes just as good, and if you really need s’mores, there’s always the oven…
Thirty-five years ago this very night, I was somewhat interested in cold beer and waterfront fireworks, but very interested in a young-ish man in a wheelchair I’d just met. He was the spitting image of Cutter John in the comic strip Bloom County. My hair was almost black in those days, and I fancied I looked rather like Bobbie. We met on a dock-turned-parking lot, outside a bar where some people we both knew were playing a gig.
The waterfront village was halfway from nowhere on the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. We both faced a long drive back to our homes in Brooklyn and New Jersey that night, but we couldn’t stop talking. Listening to our friends play was suddenly a duty. Instead, we took our bottles of beer out to the end of the pier, still talking as we watched the boats in the harbor set off simple roman candles, small peonies and chrysanthemum rockets.
Before we went back in for the second set, we had set afloat a message in one of the bottles, sealed with a discarded wine cork, wishing we would meet again soon.
That’s how I first met Timothy. We met again within the fortnight.
This blog will tell more of our story. The book I wrote, An Abecedarium of Ornaments, does so through photographs from our Christmas trees. I hope you find one, t’other, or both, interesting and worth following.