Archive for July 12th, 2009

The other night we took a night off from camping at the mall and Vince and Brand (aged 12 and 14) went into Barnes and Nobel. I was glad to see they still had some interest in print media, since their obsession with something they call a PSP, which seems to be a later-day Game Boy which also plays movies, has been nearly all encompassing. When they came out with a Mad Lib book, I wasn’t too disappointed – Mad Libs keeps kids busy and teach them grammar – actually, kids who do Mad Libs are the only ones I’ve ever seen who can tell an adjective from an adverb.

They started right away, doing their own Mad Libs by themselves in the back of the car. “Let me hear one of those,” I asked.

“No, no,” they assured me. “These are not mom approved.” Then we went ahead and we all did one together.

The next morning, I saw the Mad Lib book. I know what I was going to do. I opened it up the first page and read the non-mom-approved Mad Lib. It was as I expected. Mad Libs are funniest, when you’re 12 and 14, with four letter words in them, especially modified into adjectives. I closed the Mad Lib book. I remembered some stuff I’d written when I was their age, which I discovered when I was in college and destroyed; afraid it would fall into enemy – or anyone’s – hands. These Mad Libs were no different. I put the book of Mad Libs back down where it had been. No need to take this up with them. It was just a phase – for once in my life I believed this old parenting axiom and wasn’t worried.

Up the next morning, and the kids are fighting over the mini-boxes of cereal. They never get sugared cereal at home except on holidays and on camping trips. It’s not enough that they are angry at me about how many boxes they can have per day, one, but they get mad if someone else eats “their” box of cereal. Now Vincent, who can’t get up as early as the others, his body just won’t move before 9 a.m. on a non-school day, comes out and starts yelling and throwing things because someone ate the last mini-box of Golden Grahams.

This has been happening a lot around here. It’s almost so bad that I feel like threatening them with not buying mini-cereal anymore, except that I try not to make threats I don’t intend to carry out and the tradition of the mini-cereal on the camping trip is sacrosanct, going back to my own childhood. Maybe someday General Mills (which, we learned from reading the box, uses whole grain in every cereal product) and Kellogg’s will find out that mini-cereal’s profit margin is not enough to justify their manufacture. But so far, so good. Every year I go to the grocery store to get them and wonder and worry if they are still being manufactured until I find some.

Brand comes into the car to complain about the one-box per day rule. “Sorry Brand,” I tell him. “You can have some instant oatmeal. Besides, I’m about to go to the store and get sweet rolls and we’re going to have bacon and eggs too, so you don’t need to eat so much.” This calms him down and he goes out to get instant oatmeal, which he eats the Boy Scout way, which means, he pours cold milk directly into the bag and eats from the bag with a spoon. Barbaric, but saves on dishes, which could be a generalized description of camping as well.

The other day we went to my brother’s house for a swimming party with him, his wife, and their the kids. Yes, I know, I didn’t mention that my brother lives in Mankato too. I have to apologize to him for not giving him top billing on the beginning of this story – for not saying that it was visiting him, as well as my father, that drew me here.

Okay, fine, I wanted to see him too, it’s true.

My brother and his wife have just celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary and when we show up, the news of the day is that their oldest child, a daughter, is getting ready to leave home and move to New York City, because she wants to be an actress and things in this Southern Minnesota town are just too slow and dull for her. The parents are less than completely thrilled by their daughter’s choice of destinations but are trying to be good sports. My nephews, ranging in age from 16 to 9, seem more in tune with the local way of life – they love sports, video games, WWF, and hamburgers and hot dogs – and they also come out and play in the pool which is fun.

We have hot dogs and hamburgers for dinner and roast marshmallows in a brazier by the pool, which is a great time. Then my brother gets out a few of the fireworks he bought last year in Missouri and the real fun begins. These are not sparklers and bottle rockets; they are miniature copies of the real fireworks set off by the firemen in displays at football stadiums and over rivers all over America. My brother is going to shoot them off from his own backyard. Not much to worry about, he reasons, except for them being illegal in Minnesota. But if the police show up, he will just sweet-talk them out of ticketing him. My brother is a lawyer and he can be very persuasive, both with civilians and cops. Probably, as they used to say, he could talk a hind leg off a donkey if he tried.

He starts off the show with a red rocket that he fires by planting the launching-pad stick in one of his wife’s decorative flower urns. The rocket shoots into the sky and explodes with a lovely waterfall of light, which is small but more dramatic since it is not particularly far away, maybe 100 or 200 feet above us. . Next, a green one, and then a white. Now he brings out a huge fat firework. “I wonder what this is,” he says at he places it on the ground on it’s built-in platform. We all back up. I wonder to myself if I am being a bad parent, letting the kids watch this and perhaps be endangered by his lack of firework knowledge?

“It will probably be just one of those Roman candles, that stays on the ground,” he says as he lights it.

The firework sits inert for a second. Just as someone cries, “it’s a dud!” a huge boom issues from the tube and a rocket shoots out of the package into the sky. Everyone jumps back. The firework explodes in three stages – red, blue, then white cascades falling down. Everyone says “ash.”

“Good thing I didn’t blow me hand off with that one,” my brother says as he goes to get another.

“It’s a good thing Bill and his wife got divorced and he moved out,” my sister in law says. “He would definitely be calling the cops right now.”

“Just let the cops come,” my brother says, “I’ll have a talk with them when they get here.”

“Did you know that four people were killed lighting off one firework on the 4th?” my sister in law asks. She read it in the paper. I’ve noticed that the Mankatoans all read newspapers, as many as three different ones a day, local, state and national. Only my father acknowledges getting news from the web.

“Four people killed at once by one firework? Where?” I ask. She thinks it was one accident, somewhere back east. I try to imagine this nuclear bomb of fireworks that kills with such abandon and can’t do it. I suppose I should look it up on the web, but since I’m not on-line out in the campground, I can’t browse Google to determine the true facts of the case. Perhaps this is how myths get started – newspapers or word of mouth stories are bandied around with not enough verified background information, and then embellished with fanciful conjecture, through necessity, because the bare facts alone weren’t clear and didn’t actually make sense. I sit back to watch the last firework in the show. We’re going to make it. We’re going to watch my brother’s crazy fireworks show and live, and thus stay out of the newspapers for another day.

This is all pretty exciting, I reflect, sitting here in the backyard, reflecting on fireworks, stories of home fireworks operatives who didn’t make it, and the threat of police action. My niece wants to go to New York City for the excitement and all, but if she really looked she could see we have a kind of excitement here too.

But no. It’s not the experience and adventure of a home fireworks show that she wants – it’s the eyes of the world upon her. And for that, she will have to go to the City. How that works out for her remains to be seen.