The Best Place To See Fireworks

There’s the top of the apartment building on Lake street in Oak Park; the one that’s really more of a tower and you can see most of the Chicago west suburbs from. I was up there one July Fourth with my friend. We’d been on a mission that night to find as many fireworks as possible, not an easy project as most of them go off at the same time. After racing around with little success, she suggested we go to the top of the building on Lake and watch them from there.

Would we have been a seniors in high school, or had we graduated? Was she getting ready to go to Maryland and I to Calvin? I wish I knew because we’ve known each other since we were five and she was my buddy: The girl who took my mind off the pain of getting my thumb stung by a bee on the Pilgrim Preschool playground, my partner in an American Studies project that, when we stood up to present it, we got the giggles over the word “gangrene,” a terrible aliment, but my goodness it was a funny word to us at sixteen. She’s the one sitting next to me on the front page of the Oak Leaves. We’re laughing and holding our dozen red roses in our white dresses on graduation day twenty years ago. I wonder, when I look at that picture if others can see that our smiles seem shaky, that they’re the shy smiles of a friendship trying to be mended. I’d not been nice that year, to her, and to a lot of people, but now I wonder when it was that we stood and looked at the fireworks. Was it before or after we’d patched things up? Which Independence Day was it that we stood above those sparkles that would never be able to touch us because we were way too high?

There’s Lake Michigan, near the pier. (Is it Navy Pier? I don’t know, it’s been so long.) WXRT used to play music to accompany the fireworks that flew over the water. That year, I took the architectural tour where you get in a boat and float down the river and listen to facts and anecdotes about the surrounding skyscrapers. I happened to get a ticket for a tour that occurred at dusk and just as we sailed out onto the lake, the lights to the city’s buildings showed up against the purple-y orange sky that would soon give in to a blanket of navy. I’ve written about this moment so many times and I don’t know if I’m lying when I write that the group I was with convinced the docent to stay out on the water so we could listen to XRT and watch the fireworks. I don’t think I am. I can see the tour guide’s face so clear as we pleaded – it was the most animated I’d seen him – a slightly excited smirk, like he knew now was his chance to take a break from all that scripted information and watch this beautiful wall of buildings become characters. Like those monsters in Where the Wild Things Are.

I also can’t remember who I was with. Was it a boyfriend? My best friend? My dad? Had you gotten out of work early and met me on those steps at Wacker and Michigan? I’m sorry I don’t remember who you were but did you think that skyline was the best it’s ever been? Can you think of a better place to watch the day end?

There’s the hill on the corner of Clopper and Germantown, a few blocks from the Soccerplex in Maryland. The hill’s steep enough so that sitting on a blanket or lawn chairs is incredibly uncomfortable and your view of the fireworks pop up between the two streetlights across the street. This isn’t where you’re supposed to watch them. You’re supposed to go to the soccerplex where the real show is, but when you have smallish kids who haven’t mastered the art of sleeping in, it’s hard to motivate yourself to keep them up until it’s dark so they can see flashes of light for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. So we went to a less crowded place and waited; the girls chased after fireflies with some family friends while we chanted, “Soon, soon! The fireworks will start soon.”

Then the first BOOM and that sizzle sound and Harper said, “OOOOO,” and I’ll never be able to capture her delight and surprise at what she saw for the first time. She was sitting on my lap and each time a firework shot in the air her legs clenched, squeezing my legs, just as she’d done when she was a baby and I had her on my hip. I’d reach for our front doorknob and she’d tense up, excited for what it was she would see next: a ladybug, a daisy, the blue sky. Her legs gave my waist a squeeze and I would fling our front door open to the stairwell and think, “Yes, yes! What will we see for the first time all over again? What will she show me?”

“Does this happen every year?” Harper exclaimed pointing to sky where the lights blossomed between changing streetlights that seemed now to be joining in the show.

“Yes,” I told her, “it happens every year.” These bursts and streams of of light happen every year, no matter if you’re looking for them or not, if you’re ready for them or not, if you deserve them or not, they come every year.