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i forewent the drunken part, also skipped the sardine show. i did get a little sun today, but not enough to give me a burn, just a little colour.

gene and i are presently watching the festivities on the television. we had sparklers on the back porch a little earlier, and gene cut me up a giant bowl of fresh watermelon.

[the cascading fireworks look like golden willow trees floating in the night sky]

i think the only day of the year i eat watermelon is july fourth. dunno why, as i always love it when i do eat it. maybe i wouldn't love it if i ate it more often, though.

we had the newer, fancy sparklers that come with a wooden stick instead of a steel wire. all these years later, i can recall exactly how it feels to step on a still hot sparkler wire with barefeet. it was a rite of passage--everyone i knew did it at least once, no matter how careful everyone tried to be.

[i have a hard time watching fireworks to the soothing strains of led zepplin. fireworks=classical music for me, somehow]

and fireworks used to be almost nothing but cone shaped fountains, and things that were nailed to a tree so they could spin round and round while shooting out sparks. everything today seems to be shot into the air.

the day after the fourth, that would be the fifth, we would play with the burntout shells of the fireworks set off the night before. looking back on it, that seems awfully pathetic, but we had fabulous imaginations and our daytime day-after shows were almost as spectacular as the night-before's, at least in our minds.

[look up the word 'volvox' in the dictionary. if it's the illustrated sort, you'll see something that looks remarkably like the fireworks i'm watching right now]

i think next year, we'll try and have a family picnic on the fourth. see if i can scare up some of the plain old sparklers. buy a giant watermelon instead of just a precut wedge.

[do people realize that springsteen's born in the u.s.a. is not exactly a patriotic song? but the saturn shaped fireworks are pretty amazing]

but i'm not going to go barefoot. i know i'll burn myself. it's a given.

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