Gunpowder

by: Joan Hitz

In June 1968, foreseeing another Fourth of July in which another two or three youthful Long Islanders would declare their independence through the use of illegal pyrotechnics, thereby creating newspaper paragraphs for themselves courtesy of lost fingers and hands, my school presented a lecture, aimed at the big kids all the way down to the kindergartners, of whom I was one.

Never touch fireworks, the lecturer warned. Never never. I hadn’t yet heard the Churchill speech, but my five-year-old brain got it: Never.

It’d actually never occurred to me. I was a non-pyromaniac-in-training. In my family, Fourth of July entertainment peaked when my father squirted lighter fluid at the barbecue. Touching matches? Unthinkable. “Close cover and strike” confused me. Strike ... what? The matchbook, against a rock?

No--as an impending kindergarten graduate, my focus bypassed dynamite in favor of rapid-fire phone-number practice: seven recently memorized digits, in sequence, spit out like watermelon seeds.

So the next morning, arriving at the bus stop, I meant not to commit a crime, but to eat a cookie: a pineapple creme, beginning its mouthward launch.

“Look!” screeched my best friend, C. Near a telephone pole was a bottle rocket with a burned out tip. 

“Pick it up,” C. said, fiendishly. 

(Following her kindergarten year in public school, C. was next sentenced to a dozen-year haul with the nuns of St. Something. She probably meant to stick it to me, in advance, for my bright, nunless future.)

“But,” I said, “they said not to. Never.”  

And on the stroke of never ... I snatched up the rocket.

The bus arrived. Instead of simply dropping the firework, I chose to embark upon my life’s mission: to complicate the mundane. Still clutching my cookie, I obscured the bottle rocket beneath folded arms, then mounted the steps to perdition.

At school, a prosecutor-in-training saw the rocket tip projecting from my armpit and announced: I’m telling. The teacher accepted none of my (I still feel, defensible) logic (It’s used! It’s not real anymore!) and deposited me, logic and all, up the river--the principal’s office.

The maroon-suited principal and curly-haired nurse who interrogated didn’t seem hungry for the death penalty, but as bureaucrats, they had to hold a trial.

They sat me on the sick-kid stretcher in the nurse’s office, where the nurse, as ineffectual at interrogator-ing as I was at criminal-ing, hammered me with gentle inquiries.

Can you tell me your phone number, honey?

(For some reason, my phone number wasn’t on file. As a newly-hatched criminal, I thought I’d found my escape. I didn’t yet know about the “note home.”)

What’s your number, dear?

Seven watermelon seeds whirled through my mind in perfect sequence. But I wouldn’t spit.  

Do you know the first three numbers?

I shook my head.

What’s in your hand?  

I tightened my fist around the cookie, which had incubated back to flour. 

Show me? 

I clutched the cookie tighter. Never had a cookie in my possession remained uneaten for so long.

Finally, the nurse peeled open my fingers.

She and the principal peered at the tiny pile in my palm, and consulted. What do you think? Gunpowder?

Even a rookie criminal had to marvel. Gunpowder? These tall persons running the school didn’t know gunpowder from a cookie? I kept a straight face.

And then came the question, and answer, that bewilders my parents even today: Did your mother give you the firework?

A convict on the gallows will seize a rescue from anywhere, no matter how ludicrous.

Yes!!! shot from my mouth. Yesssssssss!!! Of cooouurse--my mother gave it to me!!! 

Confession obtained, they released me to the land of crayons. Scot-free. 

I soon learned, however, that trouble, forestalled, isn’t actually avoided.

Later, after reading the “note home,” my mother called the principal, then hung up with a face displaying the kaleidoscope of emotions specifically related to the raising of children.

“I gave you a cookie,” she said. “How ... did you get ... gunpowder ... ?”

I don’t remember another trial. I don’t remember hard time. There was a little something, rightly so, about not turning stool pigeon on one’s mother, especially when it wasn’t the truth. 

But my parents must have remained committed to my upbringing, because I do remember that each day, for the rest of that school year, I was still given a cookie for the bus stop. 

I never touched fireworks again, though. Never never. 

Next September, C. got shipped off to the nuns. For the remainder of childhood, I found a new best friend--Janet. 

Janet dared me to eat hamster food once, which I did. It didn’t make me sick, though, and she never got me sent up the river.

(first published on July 27, 2011, in South Bay's Neighbor News)