Lighting up our summer nights

I’ve set off fireworks at that park.

As an adolescent, fireworks were a kind of currency. You’d take them out of a backpack while your friends perched nearby on bikes and set them off in a spending spree. Once, my father walked by and caught us. Just happened to be walking by, he said at the time. How unfortunate, I thought at age 12, to have my father be out taking a stroll, which he had never done before, and have him stumble upon us. It wasn’t, of course, the fact that he found troubling the combination of my not being home and the nearby explosions.

This time, though, we weren’t being regular dumb. This wasn’t just an M-80 under an upside-down blue barrel. No, we were doing one of those things that remind you that children are less grown-ups with young bodies and more monkeys with human bodies. We were having a Roman candle fight. For protection we wore hooded sweatshirts and sunglasses and then more or less played tag, only instead of pats on the back we used balls of fire. It only lasted a few minutes. One kid got singed and we all acted downright surprised. But we were so careful. . . Then my father appeared. Came out of nowhere, which I now realize was behind me. Just out on his nightly constitutional. He suggested I join him for the walk home.

Everyone knows that much more common than the Boston Pops fireworks, synched up to music and broadcast from our city across the nation, are the underground kind, illegal fireworks. Less Boston Pops and more Boston suburb booms. Most of the time they are dangerous and hardly spectacular, a guy hunching to light the wick with his cigarette as he tells his 3-year-old to go wait on the porch with Uncle Mikey, who is not, technically, the child’s uncle.

Massachusetts state government to father: Do not set off fireworks. Father to children: Do not set off fireworks. Yet, listen to the bangs and whistles on any summer night. In this state - for weeks and months around the date - we celebrate the day in which our government broke away from another in order to make our own rules by violating the rules set by that new government. It’s beautifully, stupidly appropriate - America was, originally, illegal.

The Department of Fire Services reports 45 people were burned on more than 5 percent of their bodies by fireworks between 1999 and 2008, a figure that doesn’t account for eye injuries, smaller burns, or the fact that 12-year-olds are not known for their injury reporting skills in the face of being grounded. “The typical fireworks injury is a boy 7-14,’’ said Jennifer Mieth of the Department of Fire Services. “They’re not driving up to New Hampshire and buying them themselves. When the kids see Uncle Jim use fireworks with impunity they think, ‘Well, I can do that.’ ’’

We all know what’s good about fireworks. There’s something of the American ideal in their upward trajectory and beauty on the backdrop of open space. The fingers of the explosions, shooting off in exponential pathways, are a sort of Manifest Destiny writ large across the sky. And each beach organization always trying to improve upon last year’s show is like pyrotechnics as a sign of progress.

But that’s where fireworks belong: in the sky, not in kids’ hands - reflected in a child’s glimmering eyes, not lodged there. No one ever watches the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and thinks, “You know, I would like to orchestrate a smaller yet more dangerous version of that in my backyard.’’

Needless to say, I repent for pointing a Roman candle at my friend and whispering, “May my aim be true.’’ Now, every time I hear the pops and booms, I wonder if anyone’s father is out for a stroll.

Steve Macone, an essayist and performer living in Medford, can be reached at stevemacone@gmail.com.