Watching Fireworks Across the Lake

Growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, watching fireworks for our family meant taking blankets and heading down to Lake Monona to find a spot to spread out at Hudson Beach and watch the fireworks display across that lake. I would estimate that these were shot off perhaps two miles from where we and so many of the neighbors sat to watch this. This was so far away that in fact, if you were to stretch your hand out toward them, you could block the entirety of the show from your vision. But we loved it. We "oohed" and "aahed" as we saw them. We always knew that at the end there would be a dramatic finale of multiple fireworks. When it was over we all clapped.

The way my life evolved, I would watch the amazing fireworks display at the National Mall in Washington DC on July 4, 2002. My twin brother, mother, and aunt were there for the show with me. We had to go through airport level security. I had just two weeks earlier started work as an Arabic linguist at the National Security Agency. There were vague unsubstantiated hints of threats against the event. I could not tell my family about that, and I went to the event with them anyway.

While visiting the Capitol a few days later, my mother could not continue walking and after getting her to an emergency room, we would learn she had the congestive heart failure that would take her life four years later. My father would follow her in death two years after that. My younger sister would follow them fifteen years later.

The way my life evolved, I did not see another fireworks display for twenty more years. I was either too busy with work, or on deployment outside the US, or then, after I left government service, in my wife's native Romania on the 4th.

Just yesterday, with the generous invitation of the father of my friend's boyfriend, my wife and I found ourselves on the banks of Lake Hopatcong here in New Jersey. In conjunction with a barbeque, we watched an amazing show, set off only half a mile at most from our position. This meant that I was watching glorious fireworks filling my field of vision.

You have perhaps heard of this concept that fireworks noise is triggering for "Vets and Pets." My friend's dog hides in the closet whenever a thunderstorm is happening, and she has shared with me poignant pictures of the poor creature truly scared by the noise. So did the noise of the fireworks remind me of the times I ran from mortar fire while on a deployment in Iraq in 2004?

Of course it did. 

Just a week or so ago, when watching Top Gun: Maverick in the theater, only upon watching a plane explode, I suddenly thought, Shit, today is June 24. It's the day my life in Mosul Iraq changed. I heard and felt that day a deep thud. I told the CIA instrument technician working with me, "Did you hear that?

"No," he said.

"Something just blew up in the city," I said.

And I was right. What would follow was a coordinated al-Qaeda attack of car bombings. 

Everything was more dangerous after that day. I ran from two mortar attacks directed at our base. I would be the target of sniper fire. But I would survive my deployment and go home.

And so, as I watched those fireworks yesterday, I tried to remind myself--those are fireworks. You enjoy fireworks. Those sounds are not mortars. It has been twenty years since you saw this. And this is fun.

And it was. When the final flourish was over, I was not thinking of Mosul. I was thinking about how so many of the people with whom--much deeper in the past--I watched fireworks across the lake--are gone.

I miss them, but I smiled and very much enjoyed that show.