Hi,
July 4th 2021 falls on a week end giving an extra holiday without a break. Parents can plan a short trip as Monday will be a holiday giving that luxury of having an extra day . If July 4th falls on a week day except on friday, parents have to take days off till the independence day which might be too much days for a short trip. I thought if Independence day is to be celebrated on that day why is there a necessity to give Monday a holiday if ID falls on the week end. The significance is to celebrate with community as a whole not an individual or family celebration. At times I contradict myself one of the perils of the human mind.
My neighbor was talking to my wife about the list of places where ID will be celebrated with in the county. As the nation is recovering from COVID pandemic not many places are celebrating ID. I wonder why? actually this should be the occasion and in fact a good reason to celebrate as we are recovering from the pandemic and economy is back on track at least in DC belt. We finally decided on a place to celebrate the ID with unknown people. The ID was celebrated on a Giant field which has the capacity to park few thousands of cars. We in USA Celebrate ID watching fire crackers at play lit by the county police or fire man for about 20-25 minutes. The County Collected 5 dollars for each car collected by school volunteers and no bills were issued. The Volunteers can actually pocket few dollars and can give a treat to their friends. There are no counts on the number of cars that came to the field.
Food trucks were present in the park since 5'0 clock and people started coming in slowly. The moment was built step by step as more people started coming in and forming a queue to order ice cream, hot dogs and sausages. Most of the people came up with camping chair and towels to sit on them as the field grass is so thick probably a native variety. Our family was an outlier coming up with food which was available there rather than chair or towels. An important lesson is go with a thick towel or camping chair to watch the fire crackers, This gives so much comfort to sit and watch the fire crackers without much itching.
The county arranged for a music show, an amateur artist was singing country songs and to my surprise many people were watching while licking their ice cream and hot dogs. The music show went on for more than an hour and it wasn't that bad which kept the environment alive without much boredom. The instruments were guitar and drums. The singer played guitar while singing which is an impressive skill because it's tough to do 2 incredibly hard things at the same time very efficiently and effortlessly. I have no idea about the songs or lyrics but the environment made it much more enjoyable. Music, food and fire crackers can bring people of different races together as we are all genetically wired to incredible but similar things to enjoy. I remember a dad and his 4 year old son were simply jumping for the drum beats. The father was enthusiastically jumping with his son and giving his son a work out to exhaust all his energies so that the father can be at peace while watching the fire works.
The environment was buzzing with people. To my surprise lot of I saw lot of interracial couples with their grown up children indicating that racism gap is been bridging for quite some time. To my surprise dogs were missing in action it seems they might be scared of the sound of fire crackers but to be honest the sound wasn't that loud. The dog could poop once they see the grass or urinate if they saw a post. Either way it's hard to control them on a crowded environment. Apparently I saw few of them so no restrictions by the county to bring the dogs.
The fire crackers started at 9:00 clock on an open field. A new experience as I always watched the fire crackers from the residential area and found very hard to find a parking spot. this was on the field and a good experience of driving my CRV on a decent country road with car head lights but no road light. I could see the firemen lighting the fire crackers one after the other. The FM were lighting the next Fire crackers when the previous one was about to end so at times two different fire crackers were on the sky at the same time drawing beautiful flowers on the space emitting harmful fumes which were travelling up as it never touched the people watching them from quite a distance. The flowers on the sky were a treat to watch and science behind this art is fascinating and ironically we all celebrated the ID with fire crackers Made in China. The ID celebrations lasted for 25 minutes short but sweet. They end with some special FC at the end which I didn't know so my observation all these years were poor or I was thinking how to find the car and get out once the celebrations are over.
We waited for some time for the traffic to clear out. My son was pestering me to go to the car but I was hesitant seeing the backed up cars waiting to speed away to their home. Anyhow we came and found the car (a surprising thing) and drove to home with all our hearts content ending the week end in a style.
