SideCar: The Chunky Sugar Episode

Hey, it's Independence Day weekend, and I say that with some sense of irony.

I mean, yes, it is true.

The United States has independenced its way away from all of our allies so much so that we are no longer a safe place to visit, nor a trusted world leader, and that took some doing.

And I'm sure some folks are celebrating that, but I am not.

The parade in D.C. was canceled because of the heat, supposedly.

But I guess the neo-Nazi white national hate group Patriot Front didn't get the memo because they were marching through downtown this morning with their heavy clothes on and their masks and their hats and their long pants.

I hope they all got heat stroke and brain damage and no one called an ambulance.

Anywho, it's been really hot here and all the local parades were canceled and even most of the farmers markets this weekend.

But I was thinking about past fourths of Julys, both in the last two decades and childhood holidays when I was a kid.

My Auntie Hazel, who was the only one of my father's siblings to leave Connecticut, would drive up from Tennessee with the trunk of her car full of fireworks for the whole family.

But the whole family was huge.

So basically, everybody got one or two of those big fireworks plus sparklers.

And those big fireworks that are loud but pretty were illegal.

I think they actually still are illegal to buy in Connecticut.

So she would mule them up, although I think we actually bought sparklers.

I don't remember.

It's a long time ago.

Anyway, the Word would get out that my dad had one or two of these mortar style fireworks.

And at the appropriate time, which would be just before dark, maybe an hour before dark, 25 or 30 families would show up at the playing field of my elementary school to watch dad light the firework.

That was the big 4th of July event in Lyme.

And then when Auntie Hazel got too old to make that trip, we would go watch the fireworks in New London or Groton or on the Fisher's Island Ferry.

But once I became an adult, I don't really remember anything special about the 4th.

When Ben and I got together, we would spend the 4th at his parents in North Carolina, and it was nine years ago that we took Waffles on his very first road trip.

And he was really a very anxious beagle.

And our first morning there, he slipped out of his collar and just trotted away from Ben and into the wilds of the Great Dismal Swamp, where he lived his best life for three days and nights before we were finally able to trap him with a raccoon trap and a day-old hot dog.