A fifth is a bottle that holds one fifth of a gallon of liquor. That’s a lot of shots.

Speaking of shots and fifths, we celebrated the 4th.

That’s the 4th of July. Independence Day. Parades and Fireworks. The Declaration of Independence. Like a Declaration of war against tyranny and oppression. Announcing the Birth of Democracy.

An American Big Deal.

A Day of Remembrance. We need to remember.

If we don’t remember, we forget.

If we forget, we lose what we forgot.

I don’t want to be a loser.

That’s why I remember.

Like when I was little, and we had fireworks on the front lawn.

We invited the neighbors, and some came over to sit in chairs looking down the lawn toward our house.

We put on the show.

We had bought fireworks ahead of time. My Father took us and helped us decide and paid. There was a pop up stand where you could buy fireworks and they would sell to anybody in those days.

We liked the snakes. They weren’t very dangerous. Little black pellets you would put on the driveway and light with a match. They would burn with black smoke and a long black tube of ash would grow and twist and crawl around like a snake until the flame went out.

Sometimes we’d have snake wars. We’d put two pellets facing each other, strike a match with our rivals at the count down 3 – 2 – 1 – go, and our snakes would grow and curl and come up against each other and one would break the other and was the winner.

Sometimes we let other people have a snake and they would light it up and cheer it on.

The burned out snakes always left a black spot on the driveway that you couldn’t wash off, and only after a while it wore away.

Of course there were sparklers. Everybody got one. We’d start one going, and then we’d light each other. Then we’d gesture big circles and patterns in the air. Even the sitting elders got a sparkler and waved it around while they sat in their chair being young again. Sometimes they’d get up to show they weren’t that old yet, and they’d dance around like us or chase us just because.

We knew not to touch the hot wires glowing from the magnesium flare because it was still very very hot and could burn you bad and there were stories about foolish children who didn’t listen and grabbed the hot wire and burned their fingers and sometimes had to have them amputated.

Sometimes children would throw their sparkler in the air and watch it go up high. Sometimes it landed on the roof, and you had to scramble to get it before it burned the house down.

But the fireworks were the main attraction.

My brother and I were the master of ceremonies in charge. We set each firework at a safe distance on a platform of brick, then ran to the audience to announce what it was. “This is a Vesuvius Fountain.” “This is a Roman Candle.” “This is a Black Pirate.”

Then we’d run back to our home base brick platform and stike a match and light them one at a time one after the other after each announcement and a pause so the show would last longer and the audience clapped and savored each one individually.

They were mostly all down to earth fireworks, cones, tubes, towers. We mostly didn’t buy the rocket kind that goes way up in the air because they cost more and we never had enough money to live life like other people, and because when they went up and exploded in those beautiful spark bursts, sometimes they would come back down still sparking and could land on the neighbor’s roof and then the Fire Department would come and put us in jail like pyromaniacs.

We were always afraid for our own roof of our own house, because we were only renting, and our landlady was right there in the audience like a grandmother.

One time, I don’t remember the details, it may have been Johnny the Neighborhood Bully throwing a sparkler, or maybe smuggling in a firework rocket and setting it off, but whatever it was, it landed still active on the Anello’s garage roof, and we panicked, wondering if we should climb up with buckets but that would be trespassing and could land us in jail, and we held our breath as the flame and sparks went out and the smoke died so we knew we were safe.

Sometimes I wonder how I ever survived childhood.