$44

It’s early summer, 1982, Van Halen on the radio and my two friends and I excited to be on the road with my dad driving his ’66 VW Bus, the four of us headed some 40 miles south to the nearest Indian reservation to buy illegal fireworks.

I have $44 I’ve saved from mowing lawns and helping neighbors with one chore or another over the past year and I hope to parlay this money into a good deal more by being the neighborhood fireworks dealer.

When we arrive we practically jump out of the van before it comes to a complete stop and head over to the semi-circle of fireworks stands that line the dirt parking lot, with names like “The Ill Eagle”, “Boom City” and “Smoke Shop”

On the shelves are every variety of firework we could have imagined, everything from the giant mortars and three foot tall skyrockets to the “family variety packs” to stack upon stack of firecracker packets and bottle rockets by the tightly clustered dozen.

The firecrackers were mostly what I’d come for – fifty cents for a package of 50, a dollar for a 100 pack, or three dollars for the brick of 400, your choice of Black Cat, Thunderbomb, Supercharged, Mighty Mite, or Cracker Jax, all of them brightly wrapped in red rice paper with movie poster illustrations on their labels, be it a snarling cat, the Eiffel Tower with starbursts in the sky around it, or simply a rendering of exactly what was inside – neatly tied together miniature explosive sticks, tiny dynamite in red and blue starred paper, all of them lightly dusted in fine, grey flash powder.

I knew that I could sell these to the neighborhood kids who didn’t have cool dads for probably four to five times what I was paying for them, so that by mid-July I’d have a couple hundred bucks while still having had a decent stash to set off myself.

That summer and the couple that followed it were among the best, unspoken kindnesses my father ever gave me – allowing me to explore and be creative, to seize opportunities when they came; he seldom had lessons he verbalized, but many that he lived and embodied that were crucial in my becoming my adult self, ones I hope I am now imparting to my own kids, wherever their interests take them.