July 13, 2006
What she'll do for love

The fire of passion ignites like the sky on the Fourth of July.

Jill Brooks
INtake columnist

My boyfriend is turning me into a juvenile delinquent.

A few weeks ago, around midnight on a week night, we heard cars drag racing through the neighborhood.
Routinely sipping wine on the back porch, I said, "Damn kids."

My boyfriend took it a step further: he suggested we go and get them.

We gathered a few handfuls of pebbles from the neighbor's driveway and hid behind trees awaiting the miscreants return.

Making decisions like this while drinking usually concludes with the line: "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

In my youth, I was a trouble-free kid for many reasons: I was a bit of a goodie-goodie; I was afraid of getting punished.

I was into Barbies; and Bobby Brady's line "Mom always said, 'Don't play ball in the house' " was lodged in my brain.

Bobby's painful caveat came to mind often, like the recurring nightmare I sometimes have where I'm looking up words in the dictionary, but they aren't there.

Anyway, I now grant myself permission for a little unbridled pebble throwing.

The drag racers never returned, but we kept our pile of stones for future rumbles.

For the Fourth of July, we went to a fly-by-night fireworks store run by carnies in their off-season (seriously, they told me this).

We schlepped around selecting our explosives, filling the laundry basket supplied to us with Roman candles, ground bloom flowers, four-feet sparklers (so I could best chant my middle and high school and college fight songs), and a few hens in a basket. (Those were for me.)

My boyfriend is from a state that doesn't allow fireworks, not even sparklers.

I remember trips to Atlanta when I was a kid, when we'd stop in Tennessee for the banned, ultra-dangerous detonators, then smuggle them (back then, this felt like espionage) back in to Indiana.

Standing before a pile of M80s, filling my basket with bottle rockets, my boyfriend asked, "We just put these in a bottle and shoot them? These could catch a roof on fire!"

I shook off his West Coast mentality, replying: Put 'em in the basket.

For hours, we stood on opposite sides of the street and tried to shoot sparks over cars.

Our timing was always off: 5 seconds to light; another 15 seconds to detonate.

Only 8 seconds for the car to pass by.

We drank a lot, though, and spent the next morning hosing off the driveway.