After an outstanding fireworks display over Lake Spivey, we returned via pontoon-boat to the home of our party-hosting friends.  My son was tired, he’d stayed onshore and fallen asleep during the fireworks, and my wife was ready to leave.  I hadn’t had time before the boat went out to catch the show to light off some fireworks I’d purchased in Tennessee.  They were some pretty potent canons: midnight madness and some other packaged cornucopia of explosions.  I was excited to blow them off.  The fearless adolescent in me never did grow up, after all.

I ran to the shore and carefully set the package up so that the rockets would shoot up over the cove.  It was probably not considerate of me in the first place since boats were still out there.  Hindsight is 20/20…

I teamed one of the packages with a roman candle.  I wanted to light everything I had, all at once, but I feared I wouldn’t be able to get all the wicks lit.  So I settled on two.  The large package was an array of tubes, each containing projectiles, all bundled together.  The tubes were about an inch and a half diameter each.  I had no idea what it would look like except that when I saw the video at the fireworks store, I said, “wow!”  I shouted to the crowd that the fire was about to rain and they all looked on with eagerness.  At least I thought they did.  No one really said any words of encouragement nor discouragement.   I made sure the bases were secure and wouldn’t topple.  I lit the wicks and got back.

The display was impressive.  Showers of rocket trails launched up into the air and burst into medium sized flowers when, suddenly, one shot straight out the side into the crowd of people, about a dozen and a half adults, two of them pregnant women, and two small children.  Screaming, fire, smoke, booms, pops, confusion, running, I couldn’t see much, just fire.  I ran between the fireworks and the crowd and made myself as large as possible, I spread my arms out and stood as close as I could get to the still launching fireworks.  No second missile came our way.  One of the tubes failed and sent a wayward projectile in the worst place it could go.  It seemed an eternity of explosions from that one, multi-phase rocket.  When it stopped, I looked for injuries.  The 3 year old girl who was there was screaming, her father had her in his arms.  My heart sunk and I panicked.  I ran to them and he said, “she’s fine, she’s fine!”  She continued to scream.  I continued to look for burns, it was too dark.  My son was up the hill, at some distance, my wife confirmed that he was ok.  The little girl was frightened, but she was not burned.  Then my wife showed me that her dress was burned.  Fire had hit her directly and burner right through the material.  Where her arm was bare, she'd been burned quite badly.  She complained that I'd destroyed her favorite maternity dress.  The host of the party, the other pregnant woman, had a burn on her belly.  Another man had a burned leg.  For about thirty minutes, people gathered their wits and their things and went home.

One rocket launched sideways and it had injured several people.  I can’t imagine how much worse it could have been.  I won’t ever tempt that possibility.  I don’t believe they should be banned from the country, but I don’t think people should buy them, not anymore.  I won’t be partaking in that pastime.  I feel like a complete moron for having brought pain and injury, and a tremendous buzz-kill, to an otherwise wonderful party.  My apologies go out to everyone who has ever had a similar experience.  I will have to work hard to earn the trust of this group of friends again.  I was a fool.  I’m embarrassed.

My wife will probably have a scar on her arm to remind both of us about what I did that day.  While that is very upsetting to me, she maintains that it was a good lesson.  Some hard lessons are necessary and prove, eventually, very valuable. 

Lesson today:  Its not just stupid rednecks who burn themselves lighting fireworks.