My first Fourth of July was at the Lucas’s house that faced Washington Park. The field directly across from there was launch central for the Sunnyvale fireworks display. Sitting in their front yard, comfortably bunkered in lawn chairs or lounging on picnic blankets, my adult relations admired the colors almost directly overhead. I was three, and had no idea what to expect, and when the first sky rocket whistled into position and burst noisily above us, I wasted no time running, screaming, into the living room where I sought out furniture high enough off the floor for me to hide under.
The bangs kept coming, muted only slightly by the walls and windows of my grandparents-on-loan’s tract house. But the capacity for humans to adapt is remarkable, even for three-year-old humans, and I apparently crawled out of hiding, watched the show through the front window, and eventually decided that the noise was not a threat, for I spent most of that evening’s festivities on a blanket. I don’t recall if parental intervention helped get me there or not. It was an intensely personal progression – abject terror to aesthetic appreciation – and even if adults seemed to help me through it, I was actually on my own.
My later attraction to acting caused me to face the same transition from terror to pleasure on purpose and regularly in both rehearsal and performance for decades thereafter.
I don’t know if the location of our pyrotechnic parties changed because the civic display was moved from Washington Park as the city grew, and other less crowded venues became available (which eventually was the case) or if it was a family event, like Grandpa Jess’s passing, that caused the Fourth to be celebrated elsewhere. But after those several years across from the park, my memories of fireworks are mostly set on the Lopin ranch in Cupertino.
My mother was the eldest of five children. They were raised on ten acres of fruit orchard their father planted around 1904 and in a house he put up in 1920 (and that replaced an earlier structure less modern). In the dining room hung formal portraits of my Lopin grandparents, pretty and handsome, my grandmother with a strange white mound on the top of her head that was identified by my Aunt Mary as a chrysanthemum, but only after years of my wondering what it was. My grandfather’s portrait revealed a face and upper body completely out of kilter; shoulders, ears, and eyes dislevel with each other in ways almost random, and nose out of alignment in the other direction. But he was nevertheless a pleasant looking man.
He died when I was six and my cousin Gail, his only other grandchild, was about ten, and I recall very little about him. The house was of a peculiar design that required passing through bedrooms to get to other bedrooms, and in which it never quite felt that any room, except kitchen and bath, was being used for its intended purpose. My grandfather lay dying in a small bedroom immediately off the kitchen – on the way to the bath, master bedroom, and other rooms of puzzling utility – and I remember clearly visiting him there. Gail did, too. She later told me that the day before he died, she came to see him and he kept pointing to the corner of the room.
“What are you pointing at, Grandpa?”
“He’s waiting there for me. What joy.” He wasn’t, by any report of his children, a religious man.
I was offered the opportunity to attend his funeral, but declined. When my mother returned home, she mentioned that Gail had asked after me, if I were okay, were going to come pay my respects. I felt a bit ashamed for not going.
“Gail cried.”
“She did? Why?”
“Because she missed Grandpa.”
“Oh.” I was too embarrassed to admit that I had thought she’d cried because I hadn’t come to the funeral. Always the center of the universe. Or maybe it was just a problem of syntax.
The yard behind the house was shaded by a huge pepper tree and two huge figs. The area beneath them was paved with concrete, and my uncle had built a rudimentary fire pit over which he grilled spicy sausage and chicken of his own production. It also served as a perfect staging ground for fireworks-stand pyrotechnics. They were simple confections – a little color, bright light, and sometimes a gentle whistle – but when Aunt Mary oo’ed, and Uncle Jack chuckled, and Dad said “that was a good one! Let’s see what this one’s like…” the Roman candles and sparklers took on epic proportions. They seemed in their simple, homey sincerity more than a fitting celebration of a nation’s bedrock principles.
But simple and homey didn’t come cheap, and the box I aspired to cost six dollars. It was worth it. It had Silver Fountains, and Vesuvius Volcanoes, Magic Serpents, Color Cones, and Cosmic Sparklers. So around Easter, my parents would start crediting my fireworks account ten cents for each time I did the dishes after supper, and if I was diligent, by July Fourth I could afford the six, maybe even the seven dollar collection.
Of course, although they pretended it was only for my amusement – those sparkly entertainments – and that was why I should earn the pleasure, I knew I was working for whoever showed up to share in shade and sausage while we waited for dark. And that was okay. Our collective enjoyment was always worth the suds and hot water. It brought us together, and the memories of those summer evenings of aromatic smoke and easy conviviality are priceless.