Offsides

Here's the scene--I've got the whole family set up to view a fireworks show sponsored by a local neighborhood. It's dark, after the kids' bedtime, and they are squirming a little. Another family, friends of ours, is sitting next to us. We're all in folding chairs lined up along a sidewalk--all except Kaitlyn, our 2-year-old, who is strapped into her stroller. Yes, restraints are critical to containment--otherwise we would spend the whole time chasing the two-year-old around the parking lot.

We live in the "older" neighborhood adjacent to a new, fancier one. There were acres and acres of swamp land, and, in a blockbuster real estate deal, a high-profile developer plowed down all the mesquite trees, filled the swamp back up with load after load of dirt, leveled the whole thing out, and built million-dollar mansions on top of it. One of the key selling features to these homes was that the community was "exclusive". For some reason, this seems to really annoy me. I think I'm one of the people who is supposed to be excluded. Fran seems to get even more militant about it, saying that the community as a whole has a bad attitude.


One thing is absolutely certain: Nearly every day we have someone racing through our neighborhood, sometimes going double the speed limit, and they round the corner at top speed into the new, exclusive neighborhood on screeching tires. I don't know how a driving philosophy can be selected for in a population, but it has come about--this leads to the annoyance.

So how did we come to view the fireworks sponsored by this community? Well, one this is certain: We didn't read about it in the paper like every other fireworks display. Every Fourth of July, this community sponsors a display, but they make a point of not publicising it in the paper like everyone else. In fact, they often hold it on odd days before the Fourth--we interpret this as "These are our fireworks and we don't wanna share!" Do we have a chip on our shoulder? Maybe. However, I think I generally do a good job of looking at things objectively, and there is definitely something going on with this group of people as a whole. After that, their intentions are interpreted in the most negative possible way.

It reminds me of Robert Frost's "Mending Wall", and the lines:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

I guess the idea of being walled out kind of bugs me. Do "good fences make good neighbors?" And I'm a little sensitive about my kids being snubbed--the neighborhood built their own school and the parents withdrew all of their children from our local school--like they didn't want to mix with the "riffraff".

But back to our scene: As we are set up in the dark waiting for our eyes to bootleg-view the exclusive light emitted from the exclusive show, we got a call from another family--they are firmly in place about 200 yards away in a different parking lot, where the view is "better". Stubbornness told me to stay put--our car is 20 yards away and it will be so easy to leave after the show is over, but it seems the family we are with wants to move to be with the other group, so we just go ahead and do it--I can tell that Fran isn't thrilled either, as we had just gotten Kaitlyn to settle down and stop fussing.

I took the chairs across and get them set up. The other family actually was in a better position, but the area is cramped with groups of neighhborhood families out to get a good view of the show. We're conscious of planting our 2-year-old in the middle of the group and disturbing the peace. I'm thinking this when Fran wheels the stroller up to the area--the last few feet are over dirt and rock, and hard to wheel the stroller. In the meantime, the boys from our three families are lined up in the way of the stroller, watching the remnants of a different fireworks display from another town miles and miles away. It is so far that we can see the light but can't hear the "boom!" at all.

Our show was running very late by now--it was supposed to have started 15 minutes ago, and we were wondering if they were perhaps canceled--it was very windy. We were all in place waiting for them to start--well, almost all of us--Fran was coming up behind with the rickety stroller we brought in the car, not thinking that Kaitlyn would end up having to be pushed across a field.

I feel a little guilty as Fran struggles with the stroller, asking the boys to move a little out of the way so she could get by. She was standing, waiting, right in front of some other family who was being very quiet, as if in alarm over the stir from our chaotic readjustments, for a couple of minutes. Fran, self-conscious about being in the way when the show starts, was unable to move until the boys clear out. And they were moving so slowly.

That's when she heard a woman turn to her husband and say quietly "Great. Now we get to see everyone's butt..."

Fran, horrified, whirled around to the woman and indignantly said "I beg your pardon?"

The woman, shocked at being confronted, looked at Fran still struggling with the stroller, and stammered "Umm, do you need help with your stroller?"

Fran said, "No! I'm going as fast as I can--I'm trying to get out of your way!"

I stood ten feet away--it was like watching a train wreck when you can't do anything about it.

Fran had a nickname given to her by one of our co-workers when I first met her--it was "Chispita", which means "Little spark of fire". That is a really fitting nickname for her at times--and what I mean specifically is that it fits at times like this. Maybe she already had a little irritation going at the fact that we collectively don't care for this neighborhood that we're in, and that we were being forced to move after being set up for half an hour, and that now we were half a mile away from our car, and that there were mosquitoes everywhere, and I bought a six-pack of cokes and now suddenly she doesn't drink coke so she doesn't have anything to drink and it's all my fault, and we brought the crappy stroller and not the nice stroller, and that my son was off trying to find a frog, and that her husband had parked his ass in a folding chair instead of helping with the stroller, and here she was with her butt in front of these people, and she hadn't been to the gym in a week and was feeling self-conscious...so, the little spark lit up.

I saw and heard the whole thing. What the woman actually said was "Great. Now we get to see everyone's but ours..." Referring to the far-off fireworks that the kids were watching instead of the one that was supposed to be launched from nearby. Everyone was wondering why our show was starting so late.

In the split-second before I could intervene (and by intervene I mean turn and run as fast as I can the other direction before it was declared that the other husband and I should meet at dawn with dueling pistols on top of the old swamp), the two women had worked it out and both were feeling a little embarrassed--mostly Fran, I guess. Just then the fireworks seemed to start up and poor Kaitlyn, who was an hour past her bedtime, started fussing and I scooped her out of her stroller and held her during the whole show.

For the record, I prefer my fireworks in the sky.