the ceremonial dance of the jumping bug

You may recall around Christmas, I rewrote O'Henry's story Gift of the Magi. Well, maybe you don't, because according to my site meter, nobody read it. I was going to rewrite A Christmas Carol, but I never got around to it. I guess that is just as well, as no one would have read it, either. I wanted to rewrite a classic forth of July story, but I'm not sure there is one. So I wrote my own, and here it is.



The Ceremonial Dance of the Jumping Bug



I remember it rained on the fourth of July the summer that I was five years old.

It wasn’t a hard or steady rain, just intermittent showers. We sat under the umbrella on the picnic table on my grandparents’ patio during the rain. Then, between showers, we ventured out from under the umbrella to set off fireworks, hustling back under the umbrella when the raindrops began falling again.

The selection of fireworks I was allowed to have was extremely limited and consisted of ladyfingers, snakes, smoke bombs and torpedoes. The snakes were small black carbon cylinders that, when ignited, began to emit a long serpentine black thing that looked like a snake, hence the name. Smoke bombs were colored spheres with a fuse protruding from them which, when lit, would billow forth colored smoke. Despite the dangerous-sounding name, torpedoes were small bags made of what looked like toilet paper and were filled with a sandy-feeling substance, and were about a quarter-inch in size. When thrown down onto the concrete patio, they would make a popping sound. They were a distant relative of the famed “cracker-ball,” which was a small, brightly colored sphere that was detonated by throwing it onto a hard surface. They became dangerous when bitten—and I guess that there were a number of small children who bit them because they looked like candy-- so they changed the name to torpedoes and made them out of unappetizing toilet paper-like material. Still, reports of kids biting them and hurting themselves filled the news. No way was I ever going to put something that looked like toilet paper in my mouth.

However, that didn’t mean that my father couldn’t warn me not to do it. I ran around throwing them on the patio, making them pop, and my father would occasionally remind me not to bite them.

Yeah, right, dad.

My grandmother baked a cake—one of those one-layer, rectangular ones—and decorated it like the flag, with red and white horizontal stripes and a blue square in the corner studded with white stars, all made of colored icing. All of our friends and relatives brought food, especially desserts, which we carried outside and ate at the table, while listening to the rain spattering on the umbrella overhead. We’d eat until the tapping on the umbrella fell silent, and then I’d carry my snakes out into the back yard and put them on a board my grandfather had put in the grass. I would ignite the snake pills by putting the glowing end of my punk to them, and crisp, black ash serpents would crawl from the smoking tablets. As the snakes slithered off the board and across the grass my aunt hollered at me:

“Be careful! Don’t burn yourself.”

And my father warned me: “Stay out of the smoke or you’ll smell like a trash-fire. Do you hear me Jay? Stay out of the smoke.”

My grandmother yelled from the house. “Is anyone watching him?”

Everyone on the patio responded in unison, “Yes, we are.”

About that time, my father walked out to where I was and began to look over my shoulder at the snakes I was lighting. We both watched until the last snake had slithered out of the smoke and I went back up to the patio to have some more cake.

I was surprised that my father allowed me to light fireworks, because even with the snakes and smoke bombs, the tamest of all fireworks, there was fire and danger. When my grandparents and aunts and uncles wandered off and I thought I was alone, I looked up to see father watching me, to make sure I didn’t do anything dangerous.

Late in the afternoon the sky began to clear and the sun came out, turning the rain that had fallen earlier into a stifling, inescapable steam. The umbrella on the table that had protected us from the rain earlier became a refuge from the heat of the sun, but the humid air pressed against us and caused all adult activity to cease. That was when I asked my father again to light my punk. The adults wouldn’t let me play with matches. I suppose they felt I couldn’t burn myself as badly or be as much of a fire hazard if I were restricted from having an open flame. My father would ignite my punk and I’d keep it hot enough to set off the fireworks by blowing on the end, making it glow red-orange, but barely noticeable in the light of the afternoon sun.

“I’m going inside for a minute,” said my father, handing me the lighted punk, “so you be careful while I’m gone. Okay?”

“Okay, dad.”

When father was inside I quickly put together several snake pills and got them all burning at the same time, sending black carbon snakes in all directions. As I watched the smoke and ashes billow forth, I overheard my aunts talking about my father.

“He sure keeps a close eye on Jay, doesn’t he?”

“I’ll say. A real mother hen.”

I put two smoke bombs in among the fire and soon I had a rainbow of multi-colored smoke that gathered around me in the absolutely breezeless air.

Throughout the day the staccato popping of firecrackers could be heard in the distance when it wasn’t raining. When the showers came, the frequency of the popping of the firecrackers diminished, as did the sound, until finally the sound of lone firecrackers exploding was almost drowned out by the patter of rain.

When evening came, however, the sound of the popping of distant firecrackers reached a crescendo. I added to it by lighting a few ladyfingers, which snapped and popped, but were nothing compared to the louder firecrackers and cherry bombs exploding around the neighborhood. I had gotten three packages of ladyfingers that my father and I had separated and put into a metal coffee can, but I hadn’t fired many of them, because they just weren’t very exciting, so a majority of them remained in the can.

As afternoon became evening I became anxious for it to get dark, so we could set off our nighttime fireworks.

“Is it dark enough, daddy?”

“No, Jay,” he answered, his hand on his forehead to shade his eyes. “We have to wait until the sun goes down.”

I asked several more times during the evening, each time adding to my father’s irritation at having to repeat his response.

It was about eight in the evening when I finally became too bored to set off another snake or smoke bomb or lady finger and I was too stuffed to eat another piece of cake, so I just sat on the patio and squinted as I watched the sunset. Even though it was low in the sky the sun still burned my face and all of the adults looked away from the sun’s light and fanned themselves.

I shaded my eyes and continued to watch, as the sun became a burning hemisphere on the roof of a large house one block to the west of my grandparents’. Then, the half circle became, very slowly, a small slice of fire; then a sliver and finally just the unseen source of a glow hidden behind the house it silhouetted against an evening sky of fire-red, yellow and orange.

“Daddy! The sun’s gone down. Let’s set off fireworks.”

“But, Jay, it’s not dark, yet.”

“But, daddy, you said…”

“We’ll wait ‘til it gets dark.”

I again sat and watched the western sky. My anticipation of the coming fireworks display was dulled by the anxiety of waiting. It was like Christmas morning between the time when you first stir yourself awake and realize it will be hours before you can go down and open presents and each succeeding time you check the clock only minutes have passed and the early morning goes on forever. That is the only example I could suggest to describe adequately the amount of time that dragged on as I watched the fire in the western sky gradually burn out and slowly go from a fiery orange to pink, to purple and then to gray. Then, as the last glowing embers of the natural fire went cold and ashen, I saw a flash, heard a whoosh, then a bang, as somewhere, a block to the west, someone set off the first man-made fire in the evening sky of the fourth of July.

“Daddy! Somebody’s setting off fireworks! Let’s do ours, too.”

The adults concurred and we began our own aerial assault on the darkening skies.

My father presided over the ceremonies. He put the night fireworks on the board in the back yard, where my snakes had crawled into existence earlier, and everyone turned their chairs to face the display as father began to light the fuses. Father stood close to the fireworks as they fired flaming balls into the sky, or they rose into the air like flying saucers made of colored flames, or they burst forth into showers of sparks and fire. There was one flying saucer that went awry and, instead of going straight up into the air, it went toward father. Everyone screamed and yelled for him to get out of the way, and at the last moment, he ducked and the fireball sailed over his head. After it passed he stood and laughed to everyone’s delight.

Of all the elaborate fireworks we had, my favorite was the least expensive—a small tube the size of a firecracker, called a jumping bug. The jumping bugs had multi-colored pin stripes that spiraled around them. I remarked that they looked like the candles on the cake on my fifth birthday. The jumping bugs were supposed to spin on the ground in a colorful fiery dance, but when my father put them on the board and lit them, they would spin off the board and into the grass where they would lie trapped, spitting sparks and flame until they burned out.

I asked my father if I could light some jumping bugs. At first he said, no, but after I whined for a while, he acquiesced. He only let me help light them, however. He would put his arm around me and his hand on mine and as the fuses began to spark, he would shout:

“Okay, it’s lit! Now get away. Run! Run!”

I remember feeling his hand on my shoulder, helping me put distance between the jumping bug and myself. I also remember my view was obstructed because he kept himself between me and the fireworks, as if telling the jumping bug that to get to me it would have to go through him first.

The fiery dance of the jumping bugs was short-lived, because they all danced to the edge of their stage and fell off, their elegant swan songs deteriorating into a spasmodic death rattle in the grass.

Someone suggested the jumping bugs needed more room and my father’s immediate solution was to change the venue to one side of the patio, where the jumping bugs would have several square yards of stage on which to perform, and dance their hearts out.

The first jumping bug my father lit on the patio hopped two feet into the air and exploded like a firecracker. Everyone acted surprised, until someone in the crowd exclaimed:

“Well, what do you expect for a penny apiece?”

The second jumping bug did a modern interpretive dance, rather than the elegant ballet we were expecting. It jumped off of its stage and charged into the audience, causing aunts, uncles and grandparents to scatter, diving out of its path. It was one of those moments of panic when my first thought should have been concern for everyone’s safety, but my first reaction was to laugh. I hadn’t seen the adults move so fast before and it struck me as funny. I continued to laugh, that is until the jumping bug skipped through gaps in that crumbling wall of humanity, made an abrupt left turn and began to hop straight toward me. I couldn’t move. I could only stand and watch as it made three measured, symmetric jumps, knowing when it came up after the third hop, it would hit me and burn into my flesh.

As I waited in terror for the impact, I realized something had happened. The jumping bug didn’t rise for a third time. I looked down at my feet and saw my coffee can full of ladyfingers had entrapped the jumping bug and its green flame was burning out in the bottom of the can. I realized my salvation was not complete when the first few ladyfingers exploded, filling the air around me with other ladyfingers in various stages of ignition.

Then I was surrounded by the flash of fire, the feel of small concussions and the smell of smoke. I began to run to get away from them, and I heard my father shout:

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

I felt one of his hands on my arm and one on my shoulder, and we were both there together in that atmosphere of sound and fire. I felt him moving me away and as quickly as it had started, it was over. The silence was comparative. Even though there were firecrackers exploding all over the neighborhood, there were none exploding within a foot of my head. It seemed quiet—almost peaceful.

My father put his hands on my shoulders, dropped to his knees, and his face was directly in front of mine.

“Are you alright? Are you okay?”

I was overwhelmed by the look of absolute panic in my father’s face. He looked completely helpless, as if he didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t seen this expression on him before. It was unexpected. All I could do was laugh. It took a moment, but one of my aunts enjoined my laughter; then it was my grandfather, and then one of my aunt’s friends. Soon, it was everyone laughing—everyone except my father, who looked around incredulously. Then he looked back into my face and I was laughing louder than before. I recognized an instant of total confusion that became, as I watched, final and complete understanding. Then, everything was as clear as the light from the brightest aerial bomb that ever illuminated the nighttime sky on the fourth of July.

And father laughed also, louder than anyone else: last and best.

Then, we finished the fireworks display.

Father lit the rest of the jumping bugs first, and when he held one in his hand and announced it was the last one, my grandmother said, “Thank God.”

The grand finale of our fireworks display was one that shot sixteen exploding fireballs into the sky.

“Well, that’s it,” said father.

We all sat on the patio and talked for a few minutes until my aunt’s friend picked up her pack of cigarettes off a table and said:

“Look what I found.”

It was one last jumping bug.

My father took it to one end of the patio and everyone else sort of backed away. He looked over at me.

“You want to light it?”

I came over and took a match from him, struck it and put the flame to the fuse of the jumping bug. When the fuse lit, I ran to the other side of the patio, but father stayed where he was, only a few feet from the firework. The jumping bug spun to life with a green and red flame and then, as father stood motionless, it made a complete circle around him, ending back where it started. Father began a funny little dance of his own and circled the jumping bug. The jumping bug ended its dance with a fiery pirouette, and father responded with an awkward pirouette of his own.

Everyone laughed at my father’s silly little dance.

I remember afterward seeing him walk toward me, across the darkened patio, sort of a dreamlike figure moving through the smoke, held close to the ground by the still, humid night air. The closer he got to me, the less shadowy and more real he seemed, until finally his hand touched my shoulder and he was completely flesh and blood again.

He pointed toward the sky and we both stood, side by side and watched someone else’s rockets bursting into flame—flashing brilliant for a moment, brighter than all the stars, then fading to black against the backdrop of the summer’s night.