Sparkling memories of the Fourth of July

In my memory at least, the Independence Days of my late childhood were always sunny and hot and wonderful. Wonderful because many of them were spent at my aunt and uncle's big, old house in Connecticut, where fireworks were still legal. After a seemingly endless ride in those pre-superhighway days, we would arrive in Somers, a town so small that every resident's birthday was printed on the calendar. My brother and I would quickly renew acquaintances with our cousin, Jackie Brennan, who was my age, and off we would go to the corner store, named Flossie's. We would spend our life savings on firecrackers and for the rest of the day devise daring, creative and, in retrospect, dangerous ways to set them off -- under bottles and on the hoods of passing cars, for example. Sometimes we would ignite a whole package, and, as the day waned, an entire brick. At night, the grownups would put on a show with fountains and rockets, a show that in many ways was more marvelous than the professional, big-buck spectacles of today. Then came the Fourth when we arrived to find that fireworks had been declared illegal, a move that undoubtedly prevented injuries and saved lives, maybe even our own. But in all the years that followed, I have never had an Independence Day that could hold a roman candle to the firecracker-flinging Fourths of my late childhood.

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Yesterday my wife took me to see the movie "My Sister's Keeper." Watching children suffer is not my idea of a good time. If it hadn't been pouring, I would have walked the quarter-mile to BJ's warehouse and spent the remainder of the movie time roaming the aisles.

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I can't remember who wrote it, but my favorite description of the Rat Pack (Sinatra, Martin, Davis and Bishop) labels them "baggy-eyed, boozed-up, middle-aged men trying to make it New Year's Eve forever."

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Everyone has a cellphone. My 5-year-old grandson has a cellphone.

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When I was dating my wife, one day I said, "Linda, if I were a Carpenter and you were a lady, would you marry me anyway, would you have my baby?" She married me anyway.

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For someone who can't carry a tune and whose singing voice sounds like the squawk of an angry penguin, I spend a lot of time thinking about songs and singers.

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In days of old, I would hve several drinks and go wild. Now I have one drink and go beddy-bye.