On the heels of July 4th conflagrations came the epic Wimbledon tennis match, the fight for the men's singles title. Or, as they term it at Wimbledon, the "gentleman's" title. Those of you who are tennis fans know the Federer/Roddick match went all five sets, and to sixteen-fourteen in the final set. Ultimately Federer, the quiet bully, wore down Roddick like your girlfriend wears you down about buying the fifteen piece bedding set, complete with duvee.
The only thing that lasted longer than the tennis match was the fireworks melee on the river in Pasadena, Maryland. My wife and I had our families up to the river house in southern Maryland, located on a creek, which is not a creek at all but a wide river with boating communities en masse on its shores. It feeds into the Patapsco and eventually into The Bay.
So, on this July 4th Saturday, all along the banks of the river, and inland, and all three hundred and sixty degrees were fireworks--hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegal fireworks. Not the crap cones and fountains that spew a few moments of rainbow Lucky Charms colors ten feet into the air. Nope--fireworks--rockets; the kind that make a soft fwump as they are launched skyward, then burst into champagne magnolia bloom, or serpentine sidewinder trails of blues and reds. Some belch forth as eagle talons, shimmering gold; others a singular smoky thread and... BOOM!
This went on all day and all night, mercifully ending sometime around three or four o'clock in the morning on Sunday. By then it was nearly time to get up and go to church, and pray most people still had all their fingers and eyeballs intact. At least the ones that started with them intact. Judging from this, my first experience on the river, that's not a given.
The only thing that lasted longer than the tennis match was the fireworks melee on the river in Pasadena, Maryland. My wife and I had our families up to the river house in southern Maryland, located on a creek, which is not a creek at all but a wide river with boating communities en masse on its shores. It feeds into the Patapsco and eventually into The Bay.
So, on this July 4th Saturday, all along the banks of the river, and inland, and all three hundred and sixty degrees were fireworks--hundreds of thousands of dollars of illegal fireworks. Not the crap cones and fountains that spew a few moments of rainbow Lucky Charms colors ten feet into the air. Nope--fireworks--rockets; the kind that make a soft fwump as they are launched skyward, then burst into champagne magnolia bloom, or serpentine sidewinder trails of blues and reds. Some belch forth as eagle talons, shimmering gold; others a singular smoky thread and... BOOM!
This went on all day and all night, mercifully ending sometime around three or four o'clock in the morning on Sunday. By then it was nearly time to get up and go to church, and pray most people still had all their fingers and eyeballs intact. At least the ones that started with them intact. Judging from this, my first experience on the river, that's not a given.
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