On the Fourth of July we visited our friends Roger and Maureen, who live in the neighboring town. They invite us and a few other couples every year to watch the fireworks display from their deck. Last year, though, they didn’t have the party, maybe because the previous year their son, Luke, who is in his late twenties, and some of his friends, had a run-in with a local cop. The son and his friends were shooting off bottle rockets in the backyard when the cop burst through the bushes at the back of the yard, all red in the face. He gave the kids and their parents a good talking to, and after he left, everyone was embarrassed and pretended to make fun of the incident. The cop was a classmate of the son but not a buddy, and the kids mimicked him and recounted some of his grade school history.

This year there were no bottle rockets, just sparklers. Also none of the son’s friends were invited. He had his girlfriend there, Mirjeta, who was from Kosovo. Mirjeta, like all of Luke’s girlfriends, was very pretty, for Luke was a handsome boy. She was also a little exotic. She spoke with a charming accent, discussing the recent independence of her country and some of the stamps that had been issued to celebrate that independence with one of the older guys who was into stamp collecting. The fellow talking to her, Jack, I thought a terrible bore. I felt faintly embarrassed that he was pestering her, teasing her in almost an insulting way. She mentioned that it took months to get a package back home to her sister, and by the time it arrived it would have been opened at least two or three times. I thought about asking what she had mailed in the package to her sister, but I didn’t want to appear too forward, so I settled for trying to imagine the contents.

While we waited for it to get dark, we had dinner on the deck. Grilled burgers and chicken and Italian sausage, as well as potato salad and two kinds of cole slaw. Of course there was lots of iced beer and margaritas, pink lemonade, and wine. I had a bottle of Fosters beer. Rarely do I drink beer anymore, but it seemed like a good choice for the Fourth of July. The Fosters needed an opener, and one wasn’t near the cooler, so I ventured into the kitchen. After a moment’s hesitation, I guessed which kitchen drawer might contain the utensils. I was pleased and only a little surprised to find I’d made the right choice. I have a good intuition about things like that.

I was just about to open the bottle when this woman said, “Aha, caught you!” It was Jack’s wife, Pamela. I didn’t know her very well except that she had gone to school with Maureen, that she was a professional singer, and that her husband was a stamp-collecting bore. We talked about the weather in Phoenix, where one of her children lived. She was eager for him to get married. The beer was good, but I probably drank it a little too quickly. I would have preferred to get more enjoyment out of it, to savor it, but I drank it mostly without thinking. Maybe I would have been better off with a glass of wine. The dinner went the same way; I ate too quickly, without concentrating on the food. Partly this was because I was hungry, partly because of the various conversations. One of the things we talked about was the value (or worthlessness) of courses we’d had in high school. I told our host, Roger, I might not mind taking all my high school math courses again, geometry, trigonometry, algebra, and calculus, even though it would be no more useful now than it was then. He seemed to contemplate that idea momentarily but didn’t ask me why I’d want to retake the courses.

The fireworks are shot off from the parking garage roof of the large shopping mall about three blocks away. Only one big tree partially blocks the view from the deck, but most of the fireworks climb well above this tree, and we can see everything. “How high do you think they go?” I asked Roger between starbursts. He said he had no idea, but that the tall tree in the neighbor’s yard was about forty feet. “So between forty feet and the moon,” Roger said. “Right,” I said, “that narrows it down. Assuming it’s a full moon.” We chuckled while the fireworks blasted and boomed. I noticed that the loud “blank” fireworks in fact looked like little, momentary moons. I told Roger that the sound of the booms was about a second behind the flash. “That’s about a fifth of a mile,” I told him, “so using trigonometry, we can calculate that the fireworks go up exactly 747 feet four inches. Give or take.” Again we chuckled.