Tomorrow is my Mother's birthday. She raised seven kids; a basketball team and two cheerleaders. She has, at last count, fifty-two grandchildren, including ten great-grandchildren. The ten "greats" are our own grandchildren.
 
This coming Saturday is the Fourth of July, Independence Day. Every Fourth of July since I was a kid, I've looked forward to the fireworks. They always remind me of Mom.
 
The boys in our family liked to blow things up.
 
Mr. Sperkeli told my friend and me that "this was going to hurt him a lot more than it was going to hurt you." We didn't believe him then and I don't believe him now. His twenty-four-inch long wooden paddle, custom cut by the Vice Principal himself, (who also taught wood shop) with different sized holes drilled through the flat side "for less air-resistance", sang through the air three times, imprinting Swiss cheese reminders on our back-sides that there were better ways to celebrate Independence Day than blowing up the pole-vaulting pit. 
 
Hunched down between the chain-link fence that separated our school grounds from the endless green cotton fields and the short-walled box of two-by-twelve's filled with a moldering mound of not-all-that-soft, saw dust, my friend and I, spooned out powdered Silver-Nitrate powder, folding it into triple-layered triangles of newsprint. We inserted two inches of paraffin-coated, Silver Nitrate impregnated, kite string as fuses. 
 
Thursday morning, second-to-the-last-day of school, only hours away from those heady summer days of leaping between grade-school adolescence and high-school pubescent victory, we were going to make a killing. Selling our home-made, better-than-Black-Cats, almost-as-powerful-as-Cherry-Bombs-but-louder and a-hell-of-a-lot-cheaper, "Triangular Terrors", would line our Levis with green! We could feel freedom on our finger tips.
 
And Silver Nitrate, in powdered form, is pretty touchy stuff.
 
Mistake Number Two: we kept our powder keg in a Kerr-Jar, quart sized. The dusty stuff gets onto everything, your fingers, your hands, your nostrils, especially if you're crouched down, hiding. 
 
Mistake Number Three: We thought it wise to test one of the fuses before we finished all the triangles, just to make sure they worked. 
 
Mistake Number Four: Lighting a match while covered with highly flammable, explosive stuff. 
 
Our plans for well financed freedom just blew-up in our faces, singed off our eyebrows, shortened our eyelashes and a few inches of our Beatle-styled bangs. 
 
Mistake Number One: Instead of scaling over the chain link fence to the freedom of the cotton fields, we bolted upright, brushed off the charred and stinky remains of hair and quickly returned from recess.
 
We might have made it, free and clear, if not for that damn pile of saw-dust. 
 
Piled four feet deep in the middle of a one-hundred-ten-degree Arizona summer, the pole-vaulting pit was probably half a degree away from spontaneously combusting anyway but we gave it too good a reason to just sit there, smoldering. 
 
Not ten minutes into the air-conditioned and conditional comfort of knowing we had not been caught, the classroom door opened. It was Mr. Sperkeli. He looked right us, I'm sure he did. He slowly lifted his right hand up, hooking his first finger into our fear, into the gills of a fish. "Come, boys", he said, "You know which two I'm talking about." 
 
He turned his hand, palm down and extended the hook, pointing through the tall windows. We turned. Two hundred yards against the chain link fence and the cool green cotton fields beyond, smoke pillowed white from the pit, a big yellow fire truck already reeling in its hoses.
 
We rose, my friend and I. Condemned. Sperkeli never mentioned our names but he knew. We rose from the graves of our desks and walked like Zombies between the other, invisible children, out the door, dragging our dead feet down the fifteen-hundred-foot corridor, one-foot-at-a-time, across the checkered vinyl tile mausoleum of steel grey lockers and padlocks, prison, to the solid oak door with frosted, white glass window, black Roman Italics, "Office of the Vice Principal."
 
He opened the door before us. "I've already called your Mothers. This will be over before they get here to take you home. Boys, I want you to know this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you."
 
All I could think about is that he had told Mom.
 
Our butts of fire, like the pole-vaulting pit, we sat very carefully on a bench in the hallway, silent, sullen, until our mothers exited Mr. Sperkeli's office. Neither mom said much. My friend got up and started following his mother, death row. Just before the outer doors with glass and wire mesh windows, he turned around and looked at me. He shrugged then caught my Mother's eye. He froze. His face froze. Then he did the weirdest thing. The saddest face I had ever seen, morphed from frown into puzzlement, singed eyebrows raised, then his cheeks tightened, slowly, then fully redeemed, back into a born-again smile, his hand went up, his thumb stuck up and he about-faced, disappearing through into the light. 
 
My Mom had her head down facing away. She turned slowly towards me and I swear, was trying not to laugh. 
 
Mom was only thirty-three years old then. I just now did the math. I couldn't understand in those good old days that she was still young! It was no wonder but still wonderful that all our friends, the entire football squad, the wrestling and baseball team, the basketball jocks, loved my Mother more than any other. Her wooden-spoon-on-top-of-my-head, carried a memorable wallop but even then, looking back, she wacked us almost in jest, almost in fun, almost in knowing what it was like to be a kid.
 
Fireworks and Fourth of July's remind me of my Mother because that summer, after blowing up the pole-vaulting pit, she asked me to teach her how to make our "Triangular Terrors." Mom and me and my friend, more carefully of course, concocted a big batch of firecrackers, including the little ones with BB's in them that exploded when you threw them against the concrete sidewalks. Mom lit some, threw some, laughed along with all of us, slipped away to fix a dinner of Navajo Tacos, fried-bread with pinto beans and tomatoes and cheese and a dollop of sour cream, for her Basketball Team, her Two Cheerleaders and her Husband, smiled as she did the dishes with lots of help and sang as she then mixed, kneaded, rolled out, cut with a tuna can and juice can, four dozen "Super-sized Spud-nuts", her famous glazed doughnut recipe made with potatoes. And after she cleaned up the kitchen again, she climbed up on the roof off the balcony like us kids and with half the neighborhood, we watched in awe, all the bottle-rockets illegally whistling into the night.
 
June 13, a couple of weeks ago, on my birthday, I danced with my wife and my five daughters, my grandbabies and my Mother, who still "cuts-a-very-mean-rug", who teaches me every day that independence is a thing of passion, is a thing practiced, is a thing worth fighting and getting in trouble for,  is a thing earned.
 
Happy birthday, Mom. Happy Independence Day.