4th Of July

A friend of mine posted something on my fb wall today that brought back a flood of memories that I just felt like I needed to write more about. So after months of ignoring my blog, I'm back to writing!

My friend is my childhood neighbor, I can't remember a time when she and her mom and brother didn't live across the street from us in Boise. She reminded me of my childhood 4th of Julys. And what holidays those were!

My Dad always just had a way of making holidays wonderful, and it's on holidays that I miss him most. He was a very busy man, with caring for my Mom who had MS, working full time as an attorney, being involved in the Republican Party, acting as legal council for the BSA, being in Rotary, filling Church callings, cooking meals, doing laundry, and raising three girls. What I'm writing about may seem trivial to you, but I just loved being with him.

When I was really young he worked in the state capitol building and we'd visit him there, I remember walking through the echoing white and gray marble hallways up the stairs to the attorney general's office (who he worked for), and searching in his desk for the Carnation instant breakfast bars that he always had stashed there. He was 6'5" and would don a huge cowboy hat and boots (which made him probably close to 7 feet tall), and in the summer we'd drive past the sugar beet farms to the Snake River Stampede in Nampa. On the way he'd point out the crops being grown and the animals in the field. At the rodeo we'd watch steer roping and barrel racing and the best of all--bull riding! Sometimes we'd drive to Burley together because he had legal business there, and he'd teach me how to tell where cars were from by reading their license plates and would tell me stories about the cities around Burley, he'd make sure to never speed near Jerome--and told me never to-- because policemen were always staked out there, sometimes he'd use his cb radio to talk to other drivers or policemen, he knew a lot of them from cases he'd worked on, and he'd point out things from his childhood, once we stopped at Shoshone Falls to watch the huge waterfalls.

On Valentine's Day he would have a single rose in a vase delivered to each of us girls, and a dozen to my mom. Oh, how special I felt every year when I received that rose! On Easter our baskets would be filled to overflowing with all of the delicious candy we could imagine. Of course, the best candy went into my Mom's basket--pecan rolls and chocolate covered eggs with frosted designs, but she shared them with us! At Thanksgiving I remember waking up at 4 a.m. in the morning to the sounds of him putting the gigantic turkey in the oven for the big dinner that we'd eat in the late afternoon, he'd always invite someone to eat with us, and we'd still have turkey left over, it was that big. At Christmas I think of him dragging up the huge flocked tree from the basement that we had for as long as I can remember, I think of him stirring the butter and sugar together for what seemed like forever, just to make the special fudge that we would take the next day to our friends. At New Year's he would build a fire in the fireplace and we would eat fudge and play Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble and Mile Bornes, and Othello and a game whose name I can't remember now (my sisters would), but it was all about football strategy and I would always lose.

But the 4th of July was the absolute best!

As an attorney my Dad often traded work. Among other things we took golf lessons, owned a horse (my sister loved riding), and had a pool table and arcade video games in our basement thanks to some of those trades. He also traded work for years with someone who owned a firework business. So a few days before the 4th of July we would jump in the station wagon and drive to the firework stand to pick out our favorites. I don't know for sure how many we had but we had boxes and boxes of fireworks. In Boise it was illegal to have bottlerockets or mortars or anything that flew into the air, but we definately had everything else.

On the 4th he would drag out wood and build a stand on which to nail spinning fireworks, the picnic table would be pulled out to hold all the fireworks, he would have them lined up and ready to go.The neighbors would pull up their lawn chairs and if I remember correctly for a few years he got a permit to block off the street so no one could interrupt the show.

He would put down big pieces of plywood in the street and before it grew dark the show would start, with we little kids throwing gunpowder drops and pulling champange bottle strings and watching black snakes grow out of little boxes. Ground blooms would swirl in the fading twilight and then the real show would begin.

Dozens and dozens of fireworks, small boxes that turned into tanks or pagotas, spinning fireworks that turned into chinese laterns, whistling petes that pierced the night air, and butterfly fountains, fountains of blue and red and gold growing higher and higher as the night grew later and later. It felt like a magical world. All of us kids would be handed sparklers, we would draw letters and figures and twirl around the smoke and dancing light in the darkness.

Our freezer would be stocked with boxes and boxes of Casco nut bars. Have you ever had one? They were rectangular goodness on a stick--vanilla icecream dipped in chocolate and rolled in nuts. My Dad would pass them around to anyone who was there. The challenge was to eat all of the chocolate off without the side completely falling off.

Maybe it's really not so much the activities or the food or anything else, but more it was about my Dad. He had such an infectious smile and he was truly a generous person, he'd give you the shirt off of his back. He loved life and he loved people, he taught me the importance of talking to everyone, no matter who they were, and he always seemed to find a positive spin to put onto any bad situation. But don't get me wrong, he wasn't a pushover. If I came home late from a date I was in real trouble, if I back talked my Mom I was REALLY in trouble, and when I was a little girl I got spanked with a belt for pulling all of the vegetables out of the garden before they were ready (I never did that again).

Oh, how I miss my Dad. He could always make me smile and laugh.

Happy 4th of July, Dad. I love you.