The Best Holiday
If I had to keep one holiday and discard the rest, I’d probably take the Fourth.

July 3, 2001 3:00 p.m.

f I had to keep one holiday and discard the rest, I'd probably take the Fourth.

Oh, there are all the deep, patriotic reasons for loving the Fourth, but for me, ever since I was a kid, it's mainly just been the most fun.

I remember my fascination as a toddler with those lowest-rent of fireworks, sparklers — the tiny spray of bright sparks, the trail of smoke, the wire with its rough chemical residue after the thing burnt out.

Every year, around late June and early July, turned magical. The days, without school or any other responsibility, stretched longer and longer, until they were almost too much to stand.

And the nights would be lit up with fireflies, about which I'm still amazed; they would sometimes all gather together in (I assume) a mating frenzy in the backyard so that the bushes seemed to be turning on and off all at once.

The air on those nights in the Washington suburbs would be soaked in humidity, which I didn't mind — they gave the nights a certain closeness and you could almost see the air, fuzzy around the lamp posts.

And as it got closer to the Fourth, you would hear more and more firecrackers being lit by kids somewhere in the distance — little snaps and pops of excitement, naughtiness, and merriment.

It is impossible to overestimate the delight a boy takes in pyrotechnics, in the minor miracle any time something explodes. So my anticipation would build and build for the big fireworks display on the Fourth.

We wouldn't brave the crowds to go into Washington, but we'd take in the local Arlington display instead, which was grand enough at the time. I remember that my mom would say that the fireworks would start around 9 p.m., but that time of year the blush of daylight wouldn't fully leave the sky until 9:15 or 9:20.

How many hours and days of anticipation were squeezed into each of those additional minutes, agonizing as the day-turning-into-night grew quieter, and people lit their sparklers and little cones that were volcanoes of sparks, and nothing happened, and nothing happened …

… until — finally — a deep resonant boom, and the otherworldly spread of colors and zig-zagging lights and boom on top of boom, until your heart could practically explode with the sheer joy of being a kid in America, on July Fourth.