Glorious Fourth

It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illustrations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.
-- John Adams

Friday, July 4, 1997

Today is my sister B-----'s birthday! This might let you figure out her name behind the cryptic initial. We started out the day swimming. Our cousins were coming up from the DC area with their two kids, so when they arrived it was an all-day swim party. We grilled hot dogs and hamburgers at midafternoon, then had cake and opened presents.

The evening's entertainment was a minor league baseball game, the Wilmington Blue Rocks against the Kinston Indians, with a fireworks show to follow. When the Rocks scored seven runs in the first inning, we were afraid we were in for a long evening, but the Indians changed pitchers and the scoring settled down to a more normal pace after that.

The stadium was a nice, small-scale place down by the river, just a few years old but with an old-fashioned feeling. They had something happening between every inning.

• There was a game where a contestant raced down the field, bent over and put his head on the end of a baseball bat and turned around which rendered him dizzy, then tried to run back to where the prize was.
• A car with a sunroof drove along the field and people who had bought numbered soft balls before tried to throught the balls through the window or sunroof of the car. If they got their ball into the car, they would be eligible for a drawing or contest at the end of the season.
• There was a trivia contest where someone answered questions about last year's Blue Rocks team.

Of course, we had many excursions away from our seats to get popcorn, ice cream, nachos, and sno-cones.

At last the game was over. The Blue Rocks won! It's apparently a tradition that when the team wins, they throw soft "baseballs" into the stands, and our group caught two. The fireworks were really beautiful. The pyrotechnicians can do some different things when designing a show for an audience that is all in one place, as opposed to municipal-type fireworks that are designed to be seen high in the sky from all directions. Besides conventional balls of fire in mid air, there were shooting rockets with tails of fire and cascading waterfalls of sparkles, ascending from behind the outfield fence.

My youngest nephew B------ was almost overwhelmed (he hates loud noises more than most people) and had his ears covered from the very first bang. He liked having had the experience, though.

Staying till the end of the fireworks meant that we were leaving at the same time as everyone else, and there is only one road leading away from the stadium, so rather than try and leave right away, we stood around and chatted in the parking lot for around a half-hour.