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In the Locher household, Independence Day was celebrated in typical American fashion: with the immediate family gathered at a picnic table, with a grill smoking away in the corner, and with approximately two-hundred pounds of illegal fireworks just waiting to be ignited.

My father, Paul, wasn’t the type to run out to one of those shady roadside tents to buy his fireworks mere days before the Fourth of July holiday rolled around. Instead, he would plan trips to surrounding Midwest states earlier in the year to purchase them at discount prices and gradually stock up over time. Once the holiday hit, he would simply haul them out of storage and prepare for his annual display. Whereas normal people might keep massive amounts of fireworks locked up in an outdoor shed, or tucked away in a basement, for some reason my dad decided that his collection was better off being stored in the closet of my parent’s bedroom. For years my family lived, breathed, slept, and ate just yards away from several dozen boxes of gunpowder that with one ill-fated lightning strike could have wiped my hometown off the map. Thankfully, due to a small population, the fatalities probably wouldn’t have made the evening news and instead would have simply opened up enough land on which to build a Wal-Mart.

Once the burgers and hot dogs had been consumed and the picnic ended, it was typically dusk, so Paul would forcefully usher the family out to our gravel driveway for some mandatory fun where we would be subjected to his annual fireworks spectacle. My mother always found firecrackers unsettling and never let my older sister and I get too close. She figured that if my dad wanted to blow himself into smithereens, then that was his prerogative, but she wouldn’t let him take the children down with him. Regardless of how big or small an explosion was, mom step further away with each one and would slowly pull my sister and I with her. She’d stand behind us where we would form some kind of human shield. By the end of my father’s presentation, the three of us were roughly four hundred yards away and quite upset that we hadn’t thought to bring any binoculars with us.

My mother enjoyed Sparklers but anything bigger was what really made my mother nervous. Sparklers were something we could all enjoy together and we humored her by going through the motions of waving them around in the dark, spelling out our names and making various shapes. My mother, like most Americans, was eternally stuck in the same mindset of falsely believing that Sparklers are fun. She liked them because there were no explosions or loud noises associated with them, and that’s precisely why the rest of us found them boring: aside from the off chance that a spark might leap in the wrong direction and set someone’s hair ablaze, there was little element of danger involved.

On the Fourth of July, “Danger” became my father’s middle name. After setting off his bottle rockets, roman candles, and those things that fly into the air and shoot sparks (and for some reason always flew directly at your head), he would prepare his grand finale. From his box of tricks he would produce a small red cylinder with a fuse attached that he referred to as an “M-100,” which later in life I would learn was basically a quarter stick of dynamite. These small but formidable disasters-to-be made a sound reminiscent of what I can only assume were Civil War era cannons firing directly into your eardrums at point blank range. Sometime before I was born, and when they were legal, my father had purchased a lifetime supply of these M-100’s, and as they aged in years, they sometimes didn’t completely function as intended.

Typically when setting off these beasts, dad would light the suspiciously short fuse and then take off running in the opposite direction at a speed that would have put Olympic track and field stars to shame. Knowing what was coming, the rest of the family stood in silence, anticipating the tremendous blast to come. More often than not, the fuse would rapidly burn down where there should have been an earth-shattering quake, and then nothing would happen. After several anticlimactic moments, mom would poke her head out from behind her child-shield and dad would timidly approach the M-100 to investigate the problem. As the rest of us watched him do this, I could feel my mother’s fingernails began to dig into the flesh of my shoulder and I knew her eyes were glued to the husband who may or may not be vaporized in the next several seconds.

Paul would inch his way closer to the red cylinder and if he was able to stand over it nothing happening then he would deem the area safe and apologize to us for lighting a dud, citing that sometimes those firecrackers got old and just didn’t work like they should. When it became clear that my father wasn’t going to be torn apart by the dynamite, the entire family would share a nervous laugh and breathe a collective sigh of relief, my mother’s fingernails finally unsheathing themselves from my skin. Unsatisfied with his grand finale, Dad would stand over the now useless firework and debate whether he should try lighting another one. The danger had passed so we would foolishly let down our guard and naturally, it was right around this time that the dormant dynamite would finally explode.

My father would shriek, disappearing from our vision in a cloud of smoke, dust, and rocks, and in turn my mother would scream bloody murder, instinctively ducking behind my sister and I and once again impaling me with her fingernails. This sudden stabbing would cause me to bellow, half in shock from what I’d just seen, and half in pain from the blood loss that I was now experiencing and my sister would also wail, mainly just following suit with everyone else.

Our Independence Day festivities would end much like a dramatic scene from the 1986 war movie, Platoon. In what felt like slow motion, my mother, sister, and I would sprint for the front door of the house, still screaming, and now enveloped in smoke and debris while a gale of driveway gravel rained down around us like small meteorites. Mom had chosen to abandon my father out in the dark in favor of indoor safety, unsure of where he might be or in how many pieces.

After we had retreated to the safety of the house, our screaming would subside and dad would stroll inside several moments later, a large smile across his face. Mom would immediately begin yelling at him for endangering the lives of his family and everyone in a fifty-mile radius, but based off of the glazed-over look in his eyes, I always doubted that he was listening. He had clearly drifted off in his head, likely congratulating himself for putting on such a great Fourth of July fireworks display. I could tell by the Sparkler-esque twinkle in his eye that he was looking forward to doing it all over again next year.

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