Steve Batie: You can smell it in the air
People who are supposed to know such things — psychologists, scientists, folks with research fellowships and the like — say that nothing can trigger a memory as much as a smell.
Sniff frying bacon and you’re sitting cross-legged under the table in Mom’s kitchen.
The cloyingly sweet stench of lilacs? Every spring it takes me right back to the alley behind Grandma’s house, where they grew garage-high in an impenetrable tangle.
Gasoline? Bill & Bud’s Texaco, where they filled Dad’s latest Ford and washed the windows and checked the tires and the pump pinged for every gallon.
Bread baking? Back under that table again.
And the acrid scent of burnt sulphur?
The Fourth of July.
The Fourth of July, Independence Day, the only holiday that falls during reliably nice weather.
It was the high point of the kid summer, a much bigger deal than vacations to Colorado and South Dakota or fishing trips to the river or even my little brother’s birthday just a week later (although he might quibble).
Because once a year, for just that one glorious week, you could play with matches.
A whole big, new, fresh box of Diamond kitchen matches. The kind you can strike on a sidewalk or the zipper of your jeans.
(Gimme a break. It was the ’50s, and baby boomers weren’t nearly as valuable as their own children would come to be. Besides, it’s not like they gave us guns. OK, at least not big guns.)
The fireworks stands opened a week before the Fourth, and the first order of business was biking to each nearby operation to scope out the year’s offerings.
It varied. Sometimes you could get torpedoes; sometimes they were banned by the latest city ordinance. Silver Salutes and Black Cats one year but not the next. One dismal year, they banned not only the 1¼-inch firecrackers but also the ladyfingers, firecrackers so piddly you could almost let one go off between your lips.
(Baby boomers were not universally intelligent, but isn’t it better to filter the gene pool early on?)
It was vital to check out the prices on fireworks, because kids have only so much money — and it had to last the whole week.
We’d need plenty of smoking capsticks, of course, so we could drop them into the sewer (a very satisfying reverberation) and play capstick tennis (toss one back and forth over a clothesline; if it explodes on the other side, you get a point — two points if somebody’s actually holding it).
Also Red Rats, those little rudderless rockets that took off in unknowable directions and eventually blew up. During that ladyfingerless year more than one child discovered that the explosive charge in the nose of a Red Rat was, indeed, a ladyfinger. A removable ladyfinger. Adults were so-o-o-o clueless.
Bottle rockets were de rigueur for bottle rocket war, but you could substitute Roman candles in a pinch (it was exactly what you think).
And those 1¼-inch Silver Salutes and Black Cats?
Well, how else are you going to charge your ball-bearing cannon or play Toads in Space?
It’s a wonder the baby boomers survived to pay Social Security, much less drain it dry.
Footnote
I intended this to be a how-to HouseWorks about some of the instruments of destruction we designed to “enhance” our enjoyment of fireworks — the Red Rat guns, the snakes volcano, the bottle-rocket mortar.
Then I came to my senses.
But if you’re looking for ideas, well, there’s that address below.
Send your home repair and remodeling questions to: HouseWorks, P.O. Box 81609, Lincoln, NE 68501, or e-mail: houseworks@journalstar.com.
Sniff frying bacon and you’re sitting cross-legged under the table in Mom’s kitchen.
The cloyingly sweet stench of lilacs? Every spring it takes me right back to the alley behind Grandma’s house, where they grew garage-high in an impenetrable tangle.
Gasoline? Bill & Bud’s Texaco, where they filled Dad’s latest Ford and washed the windows and checked the tires and the pump pinged for every gallon.
Bread baking? Back under that table again.
And the acrid scent of burnt sulphur?
The Fourth of July.
The Fourth of July, Independence Day, the only holiday that falls during reliably nice weather.
It was the high point of the kid summer, a much bigger deal than vacations to Colorado and South Dakota or fishing trips to the river or even my little brother’s birthday just a week later (although he might quibble).
Because once a year, for just that one glorious week, you could play with matches.
A whole big, new, fresh box of Diamond kitchen matches. The kind you can strike on a sidewalk or the zipper of your jeans.
(Gimme a break. It was the ’50s, and baby boomers weren’t nearly as valuable as their own children would come to be. Besides, it’s not like they gave us guns. OK, at least not big guns.)
The fireworks stands opened a week before the Fourth, and the first order of business was biking to each nearby operation to scope out the year’s offerings.
It varied. Sometimes you could get torpedoes; sometimes they were banned by the latest city ordinance. Silver Salutes and Black Cats one year but not the next. One dismal year, they banned not only the 1¼-inch firecrackers but also the ladyfingers, firecrackers so piddly you could almost let one go off between your lips.
(Baby boomers were not universally intelligent, but isn’t it better to filter the gene pool early on?)
It was vital to check out the prices on fireworks, because kids have only so much money — and it had to last the whole week.
We’d need plenty of smoking capsticks, of course, so we could drop them into the sewer (a very satisfying reverberation) and play capstick tennis (toss one back and forth over a clothesline; if it explodes on the other side, you get a point — two points if somebody’s actually holding it).
Also Red Rats, those little rudderless rockets that took off in unknowable directions and eventually blew up. During that ladyfingerless year more than one child discovered that the explosive charge in the nose of a Red Rat was, indeed, a ladyfinger. A removable ladyfinger. Adults were so-o-o-o clueless.
Bottle rockets were de rigueur for bottle rocket war, but you could substitute Roman candles in a pinch (it was exactly what you think).
And those 1¼-inch Silver Salutes and Black Cats?
Well, how else are you going to charge your ball-bearing cannon or play Toads in Space?
It’s a wonder the baby boomers survived to pay Social Security, much less drain it dry.
Footnote
I intended this to be a how-to HouseWorks about some of the instruments of destruction we designed to “enhance” our enjoyment of fireworks — the Red Rat guns, the snakes volcano, the bottle-rocket mortar.
Then I came to my senses.
But if you’re looking for ideas, well, there’s that address below.
Send your home repair and remodeling questions to: HouseWorks, P.O. Box 81609, Lincoln, NE 68501, or e-mail: houseworks@journalstar.com.
Copyright © 2002-2009 Lincoln Journal Star. All rights reserved.