July 4th, 2015

Asbury Park, July 5th, 2014

Fireworks

I really don't enjoy the winter. Like at all. There really aren't that many things I like doing in winter. I don't ski or snowshoe or ice skate, so the cold and the snow and the ice are just inconveniences to me most of the time. Holing up in a warm house with the family can be nice, but that's about all the attraction winter holds for me. Even then, as the snow falls and as we watch it from the warmth and safety of our living room, I just end up thinking about having to shovel it the next day.

I dislike winter so much, as a matter of fact, that virtually none of my fondest memories have to do with winter. I must have blocked it all out. Instead, the fondest memories I have come from the summer -- specifically, July 4th.

My family moved to New Jersey from Brooklyn in 1975. I remember sitting on a blanket in Marine Park in Red Bank with our next door neighbors during the Bicentennial fireworks of 1976, our second summer here. There was fried chicken. Probably beer. My parents weren't even 30. My four-year-old brother covered his ears and cried. At 6, I apparently ate it up.

We would go to those fireworks every year for a while. I think my brother cried until he was about 8. Eventually, the sheer number of people and the lack of parking made it a little more trouble than it was worth for our family. Even though I said I hated Red Bank during the fireworks, I'd always end up making my way to watch them. There was the time I rode my red huffy 10-speed there by myself -- so I couldn't have been 17 yet -- and weaved my way among the crowd. I ran into MomVee and her mom. Another time, my friends and I watched the Red Bank fireworks from a friend's backyard along the river with the Spanish exchange student who had just arrived that day. He thought we had fireworks every weekend.

Six or seven years later, CoolMom came "down the shore" with me. CoolMom loves fireworks. We were just friends then; but, as we sat on the jetty in Sea Bright with the explosions going off right above us, I was about as happy as I've ever been. A few summers later, she and I were enjoying a long holiday weekend on the Oregon coast. We'd driven down from Seattle, and we watched the Astoria fireworks from a pier along the water. Then there was that year that we sat on the roof of CoolMom's parents' little casita in Santa Fe, wrapped in heavy blankets against the cold desert evening, to watch the display launched from the Santa Fe Downs race track.

My brother and sister-in-law lived in West Long Branch for a while, and that's when we started going to see the fireworks there. Franklin Lake is pretty at night and also pretty low-key as far as Fourth of July fireworks go. Though, there was the one time -- soon after my second nephew was born -- when a sudden violent thunderstorm and some wayward shells made it feel like we were in a war zone. We ran, my sister-in-law screaming, white knuckled clutching the baby in his car seat, as thunder boomed and rockets whistled past and crashed into some of the driveways around the lake.

CoolMom and I helped her aunt and uncle move their sailboat from Connecticut to Maine one year. The nine-day trip was a little much for CoolMom, four months pregnant with CoolDaughter #1 and never into roughing it. But there were nights -- anchored off of Plymouth on July 3rd and, maybe, Salem on July 4th -- when we sat gently bobbing in the harbor and couldn't believe how lucky we were to be seeing the show from that vantage point.

Once we had the cooldaughters, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that we'd go to fireworks every year. The girls' love of fireworks against my professed indifference is a bond that they share with their mom. There were the times we went to Marine Park while Kaboom! was still a thing, me grumbling in my curmudgeonliness the whole way. We watched Sea Bright's show from inside our car on a Rumson side street. In Rumson's Victory Park, we watched fireworks from both Red Bank and Rumson one year. We had to push CoolDaughter #2 in her jog stroller from the parking lot at RFH.

I can remember lying on our backs in some field somewhere and getting that thrill of watching the fireworks go off right over our heads, but I can't remember where that was. We continue our West Long Branch tradition to this day. Every time the cooling embers swirl down from the sky there, I smile and think of that harrowing night several years ago. We've stood at the top of the bridge into Oceanport and watched the show from Long Branch. Last year, we watched from the boardwalk in Asbury Park.

CoolMom is already making plans for us to see something tonight. West Long Branch. Asbury. Whatever works. I'm grumbling like I always do: crowds, traffic, parking and for what? 20 minutes of smalltown fireworks?

It's such a hassle, and we probably won't even remember it a week from now.

Have a safe and peaceful Fourth of July.