In Celebration of Independence Day

I am taking my kayak out for its initial run. In the meantime, I am again pilfering my past by providing you with this very true anecdote:


Independence Day Fireworks, Police Style

I am going to share a very interesting holiday experience with you. But allow me a quick observation before we start:

Ray Bradbury, in an introduction to the novel Dandelion Wine, wrote:

"This book, like most of my books and stories, was a surprise. I began to learn the nature of these surprises, thank God, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, I thought that you could beat, pummel and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity and dies.

It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered into a word association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that came into my head....First I rummaged through my mind for words that could describe my personal nightmares, fears of night and time from my childhood, and then shaped stories from these."

Ray wrote this introduction in 1974. The novel was penned in 1956.

I cannot take this approach. I'm not a writer, I suck at word associations, and I've driven my memory cells into a permanent state of menial submission. I cannot remember my ideas long enough to even be aware that I have had ideas in the first place.

So instead I drink. And every once in awhile a lonely beer molecule gets lucky and copulates with a random life event and ends up spawning a child named immodesty. And that's when I end up wanting to tell people something.

I present this unnecessary preamble because I want to tell y'all about the events of my July 4th holiday that resulted in the Jackson Police Department's SWAT team occupying my front lawn.

But I am getting ahead of myself. In truth it all started - Here we go: Life, meet Budweiser - with a round of golf, a cold beer and a phone call.

I'll share something with you: Celebrating the Fourth of July in Mississippi is a classic risk/reward scenario. Yes, you are not confined for the day to an office cubicle decorated with carpeted walls - did you ever stop to think about how many office workers in America toil in narrow cells surrounded by decoratively padded walls? - but the flip side is that it is mandatory that you cavort with the fifth and sixth Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Heat and Humidity. The two bastard parents of the mosquito, the State Bird of Hell. I am positive that after a weekend of basically being a walking hot lunch buffet for these creatures I have already been infected with a dormant case of Malarial Nile Fever, even though my physician is not competent enough to confirm this diagnosis.

I'll make a confession. If I were a doctor, I would agree with anything my patient suspected that they had. They want cancer? Fine, they've got it. I wouldn't care if John Smith came into my office convinced that he had somehow contracted ovarian cancer. Why fight it? If John wants ovarian cancer, John has ovarian cancer. I wouldn't even be conflicted over the technicality that John does not actually have ovaries - after all, it's marketing 101: The customer is always right. Perhaps I might steer him towards breast cancer just for the sake of plausibility, but that's as far as my ethics would force me.

So I spent Saturday golfing in the heat and humidity with Larry, watching him hit majestic drives that invariably led to me losing every bet while constantly getting re-infected with mosquito borne pathogens. Larry will retire wealthy, and he will have me to thank. He should write a book: "The Road to Wealth, Fifty Cents at a Time". By the time we are done, I am exhausted from saying "Nice shot" after each of his swings. So upon arriving at my home, I slide my drained body into my couch with a cold beer and drift happily into an early sleep.

That lasted about an hour, which is about 11 hours less than what I was hoping for. Instead of spending all of the evening having really cool dreams which I would not remember when I awake, much to my disappointment, I instead am greeted by a phone call. At 10:00 PM. Which means that it's Keith, who has just left his seventh little league all-star game of the day and desperately wants a beer to kill the itch of all of his pathogen-drenched mosquito bites. At least that is what I assumed, for I did not bother to pick up the phone as it meant leaving the couch, which I was emotionally unable to do. Unfortunately the phone call also awoke the dogs, who tend to sleep all day and consequently are not bothered by late night phone calls nearly as much as I can be. And they burst into full alarm mode, barking and howling until I am forced to crawl forth and peek out of my drawn curtains.

And a good thing I did, for there, parked 2 houses down in the middle of the street, is the biggest bus I have ever seen. Huge. So big it had 4 air-conditioning units on its roof. All of my neighbors are outside gawking. Instantly I processed this scene and came to the only conclusion that seemed to fit the facts: Willie Nelson was for some reason visiting my neighbor Eric. I don't know if Eric actually knows Willie, but Eric is a lawyer and Willie over the years has had ample opportunity to employ just about every lawyer who has ever hung a shingle, so it made sense.

Unbelievably, however, this conclusion was wrong. As it turns out, the bus parked in the middle of my street was not Willie's tour bus, but something even more puzzling: the mobile emergency response headquarters for the Jackson Police Department. Chewing on this fact, I came to the same conclusion that you have: Eric is growing a lot more marijuana than most other lawyers that I know.

But that conclusion too turned out to be incorrect. And as Eric, by this time lurking down the street so as not to lay claim to owning the house with the highest percentage of police guests in the city, stood outside chatting with all of the other voyeurs in the neighborhood, we witnessed the only thing absolutely guaranteed to raise the excitement level to an even higher state of wonder: The SWAT assault vehicle arrived, stopping exactly at my driveway.

Have you ever seen a SWAT team up close? It's intimidating. One, they are huge. Big boys, all dressed in Kevlar outfits that make them appear like contestants in a football death match. Two, they all have guns. Lot's of them. Big guns, small guns, guns that themselves have other guns attached to them. And three, these guys don't talk. They grunt, they whisper, and unless you are doing something that they can kill you for they have absolutely no interest in you. Even the mosquitoes, our constant companions up to this point, cast one beady multi-faceted eye upon these war-painted apparitions and another eye on the big armored van that in giant mosquito-threatening letters read "SWAT" and skedaddled for the night.

According to the very kind police officer that was in charge of all of the police who did not have the balls to be closer to the action, they were all in my driveway because we had a divorced father four doors down as a neighbor who had - on a lark - seized his 88 year-old wheelchair bound landlord and his 7 year old daughter and was holding them hostage at gunpoint. The SWAT team was mobilizing to launch a rescue mission while our local terrorist was calling his former Navy Seal instructor and telling him he was going out in a blaze of fighting glory.

Of course, the entire neighborhood did what all rationale people would do when faced with a potential shootout: We brought out lawn chairs and snacks.

Did you know police no longer use radios to communicate? Reporters monitor police frequencies, you see, and have a distressing habit of showing up with cameras at the precise moment that police are doing something to a criminal that they would rather not have on film. So now police use cell phones to coordinate the fight against crime while media types hunch around police scanners and wonder why crime has dropped so precipitously.

In the interest of brevity, the sequence of events Saturday evening went something like this:

10:20 PM: The SWAT team leader receives a cellular phone call.

10:22 PM: The SWAT team members give high fives, don doo rags and camouflage, and grab short barrel assault rifles.

10:27 PM: The SWAT team gets ready to deploy. Tension mounts.

10:35 PM: The SWAT team leader receives a cellular phone call.

10:41 PM: The SWAT team stands down. Guns are racked.

10:42 PM: The neighborhood forms a common beer supply.

10:57 PM: The SWAT team leader receives a cellular phone call.

11:01 PM: The SWAT team give high fives, don face paint, and grab long-barrel M16's.

11:09 PM: The SWAT team gets ready to deploy. Tension mounts.

11:20 PM: The SWAT team leader receives a cellular phone call.

11:21 PM: The SWAT team stands down. Guns are racked.

11:30 PM: The neighborhood sends out for more beer before the convenience stores close.

11:40 PM: The Paramedics on stand-by begin shopping for a bathroom. Suddenly my home is the pit stop for all on-duty city employees, with the exception of the SWAT team members who apparently do not pee.

12:15 PM: The SWAT team leader receives a cellular phone call.

12:17 PM: The SWAT team gives high fives, don night vision goggles and grab high powered sniper rifles.

12:19 PM: The thought occurs to me that I wish I had bought some firecrackers because this would be a jolly time for an innocent prank.

12:19 PM: The thought occurs to me that I am glad I have no fireworks, because this would be absolutely the worst time for an innocent prank.

12:20 PM: The SWAT team gets ready to deploy. Tension - well, let's face it, by this time it's getting a bit wearing.

12:27 PM: The SWAT team leader receives a cellular phone call.

Well. That's the gist of it. I went back to bed at 2:00 AM, joining my dogs who had lost interest as soon as they realized that none of these people had any food. When I awoke, everyone was gone. The neighborhood was quiet and harmonious. The gentleman in question peacefully surrendered, and while I do not have all of the details somehow this is being characterized as one great big misunderstanding. Go figure.

I ended my holiday on the porch overlooking an empty street, sipping a beer and swatting mosquitoes. And thinking that despite all of our problems, America is still the most entertaining place on the planet, despite the fact that we all have a gestating case of Malarial Nile Fever.