Fireworks-induced euphoria
Best evening entertainment in a long time – fireworks on Revere Beach this past Saturday in honor of the sand sculpture contest. I had to work a little to get Tony, Lizzie and Vicky to think it was worth going out into the heat for. It was. There were many components to the perfection:
Weather – It was a hellishly hot day, but by the time we got to the beach at 7 it was 10 degrees cooler there than in the city. Also getting there that late, we enjoyed the best parts of the beach (per me, that is) — walking on sand, smelling salt air, looking at the water, without my less-favorite parts – wearing bathing suits, getting wet, sunburn.
People – Lots of folks, but still plenty of room to spread out on our bedspread. Also, because Revere is an urban beach, accessible by mass transit and across the street from rows of apartment buildings, the crowd was as diverse in age, race, nationality and dress as any I’ve ever been in. Many families, lots of local teens, many languages (including ASL!), wonderful. For the first, somewhat sheltered, 20-some years of my life I experienced beaches exclusively as places that people drove a long way to, having packed up for a day at the beach. The only people who walked or biked to the beach were either very wealthy or on vacation or both. And nearly everyone was white until we got sunburned red. The urban beach, where ordinary working people go for an after-dinner walk, fully dressed elderly people sit on benches and chat, where homeless people and skateboarding teens and people of color all share space, was a pleasant shock the first time (Venice Beach) and still amazes me.
Food – Nostalgic smells of fried dough and other fried foods, but we had our own yummier, healthier picnic of grilled swordfish and potato salad and no standing in lines.
Culture – We looked at the sand sculptures, technique is impressive, a couple were intriguing, generally not my aesthetic, but hey it was free and Lizzie enjoyed taking pictures. She also entertained us and many of the surrounding beachgoers with her impressive hula-hooping skills, using her new dad-made hoop.
Weather, again – Showers were predicted and for an entire hour before the fireworks started, rainclouds lurked on the horizon spiked by a couple spectacular bolts of lightning. But the rain went out to sea and we and the fireworks stayed dry.
Fireworks – When they finally started at 9, I was already so happy because of everything listed above that it was hard to improve on, but of course fireworks always make me happier. We were only a few hundred feet from the launching pad of the fireworks themselves, so I could feel the explosions of the louder ones in my ribcage and smell the sulfur and the smoke. The booms bouncing off the tall buildings across the boulevard added to the pleasure. Lying flat on the bedspread on the sand the pinwheels opened not over there in the sky but right over our heads, the way they did in my childhood when we would watch from the baseball field where they were launched on July 4th. The brighter ones, especially the red ones, illuminate people around us with a wonderful glow.
Every time I see fireworks brings back a fragment of every other time I have seen them: with my family in Connecticut, from the riverbank in Boston, in suburban fields outside Tokyo, where in summer they seemed to have them nearly every weekend somewhere, from rooftops in New York and balconies in Moscow, which is so big that they set them off in several locations around the city. But these were my first fireworks on a real beach.
The Revere show was astonishingly luscious – it went on for a deeply satisfying half hour, a lifetime in fireworks. There were at least 3 pseudo-finales before the real one, which, like all good finales, was so frenetic and excessive that we worried something had gone wrong with the timed fuses and set off all the remaining fireworks at once. Ridiculous excess is good in fireworks. And not fattening.
Triumph over the odds, nostalgia, exceeding my own and others’ expectations – all in all, a perfect evening.
Photos by Lizzie
My Dental Big Dig, part 3
Had the implant removal done on July 3, just before leaving on vacation. Another medieval
procedure, removing something that was meant never to be removed. The implant is screwed into bone, which grows around it, so taking it out meant lots of novocaine followed by well over an hour of drilling around and around it then occasionally torquing it with various wrenches and all of my dentist’s body weight. My dentist was frustrated, his technician desperately wanted to go home, I was aching from keeping my mouth open. Did I mention that my 4:30 appointment didn’t start till after 6 because he had an emergency case? When he finally dropped the bloody quarter-inch chunk of metal into a pan close to 8 pm, we were all exhausted.
A lovely bruise surfaced on my chin a day or two later and my jaw was sore for days, but now it’s 3 weeks later, my stitches are out and apparently things are healing nicely. So in a mere 6 months, the bone grafting should have done its thing and he can put a new and better screw back in my jaw. Oh joy.
Gummy Teeth by rachel is coconut&lime via Flickr.
