Will Blows up Some Stuff

A good July 4th to Stroock's Books readers except those in Great Britain and the Commonwealth. Suck it, limeys. Fun fact: me mum' side had family in the Colonies during the War of the Rebellion, Orange County, New York. We were Loyalist. Scotsmen you see, what we here in the Colonies call the Scotch-Irish. Our mum's dad told her to always where Orange on St. Patrick's day. And so we have. 

We don't know that we've many insights today. Facebook memories is interesting, and showing us pic after pic of family vacations to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Looking at pics, man, we really have slimmed down. Back in 2014, say, we had the build of an NFL offensive lineman with plenty of brawn but also a gut. 

We're about 270 pounds then. Not now:

Note the Stroock Strategic Seltzer reserve in the background 

We'll never be 'thin'*, and we can't quite seem to break that 240 barrier. But when we look down, we see our toes. And dang, look at how our face has thinned out.  

On the 4th our thoughts turn to our childhood fireworks displays. Totally unsupervised, by the way. With our friends we took to the neighborhood cul-de-sac and blew stuff up till 11 PM. In a decade of fireworks hooliganism only one kid was ever hurt with some minor hand burns. Fireworks safety isn't all that hard. [You used to play something you call 'bottle rocket hockey'-Ed]. 

During our later teen years we and our friends' amateur pyrotechnic display became kind of a neighborhood thing. Adults would come out, set up chairs, pop a beer and enjoy the show. 30 years ago this summer, with our best buddy (still), we held our last fireworks show. For supplies we took a good old fashioned college road trip to Eagle Fireworks on Route 70 in Ohio (we used to stop there on the way to visit family in Kentucky). In 24 hours we rode there and back. The trip killed off our glorious 1986 Toyota Celica GT. Of course on the way back we took the long way, stopping off to visit a certain girl in Delaware. 

Ah...our last fireworks show and we didn't even know it. 1994 was our last real summer too. One never knows it, of course. During the summer of '95 we interned for Senator William V. Roth (R, De), and learned what it was like to work in an office all day. In 2002 we stopped at Eagle Fireworks one last time, when we and Mrs. Stroock did that drive to Kentucky. We walked the shelves with the eyes of a 17-year-old but the wallet of a grown man. Later that year we wondered, what the hell are we supposed to do with six gross of bottle rockets?

*We swear an older, comely woman has been checking us out on the Stairmaster of late.