I am writing this from the front seat of the Tahoe in the Ingles parking lot because Garrett has already loaded a flat of sparklers into the cargo area and I cannot, in good conscience, drive these home without first reading the side of the box, which I did, and which is the reason my hands are shaking on the steering wheel and Ember is asking why I keep saying the word strontium.
One sparkler. One. Is approximately fourteen grams of barium nitrate, aluminum powder, iron filings, and a dextrin binder that the box describes only as “binder,” which is the word people use when they do not want you to ask the next question. Garrett bought a hundred and forty-four. We have four children. Do the math with me in the parking lot. That is thirty-six metallic-fuel rockets per child, held at face level, on Friday, in our driveway, voluntarily, while a neighbor films it for the grandparents.
I do not want to be the woman in the cul-de-sac with the clipboard. I have been her before. I will be her again. But the Facebook group I trust most on this — it is called Sparklers Are Just Tiny Smelters and Nobody Will Say It, and the moderator is a former pyrotechnician from a county fair in Ohio who left the industry over what she saw — has been pinning the same SDS sheet for two weeks straight, and the SDS sheet uses the phrase “do not inhale fumes” four separate times in a product designed to be waved one foot from a child’s open, laughing mouth.
My sister-in-law Renee, who works the front desk at the pediatric office in Black Mountain and is basically a nurse, said barium is what they make you drink before a GI scan and that is the controlled medical version, in a cup, with a doctor present, and we are about to aerosolize it over a kiddie pool while Garrett’s brother plays Toby Keith on a Bluetooth speaker shaped like a football.
And listen — I am not anti-sparkler. The sparkler my grandfather lit in his driveway in 1962 was, by every account I have been able to gather from his sister Marlene before she passed, essentially iron filings, a little potassium, and pride. That sparkler smelled like a barn. That sparkler put off the kind of smoke a man could stand in. The modern sparkler smells, and I will die on this, like the inside of a hair dryer that has been left on a beach towel.
Garrett’s response when I showed him the ingredient panel was to forward me a newsletter from his old high school baseball coach — the coach has a Substack now, which is its own conversation — arguing that “the kids will be fine” because “we all did this and we turned out okay,” and I would gently point out that Coach Bowden is currently writing a Substack from a recliner about how aluminum bats ruined America, so the bar for “turned out okay” has shifted considerably since 1978.
I made some calls. The hand-dipped beeswax tapers I was hoping to substitute have a six-week lead time from the woman in Weaverville who does them, which is what happens when you try to source a holiday ethically two days out. The LED “safe sparkler” from Target contains a button battery, and a button battery is, in my opinion, just a sparkler that has learned patience. The clean option, the woman in the Telegram channel told me — and I screenshotted this so I have it — is a single lit sage bundle held by an adult while the children watch from the porch, which is, and I want to be honest with you, not going to play with my father-in-law.
So here is the plan, and I am workshopping it. Each child gets one (1) sparkler, lit by me, held downwind, over the gravel, for the duration of “God Bless America” only, after which it goes directly into a galvanized bucket of well water that I will then dispose of at the transfer station, not in our garden, because the soil around our blueberries has been through enough this year between the mulch incident and what the Lowe’s flag did to the garage.
The remaining one hundred and forty sparklers Garrett bought are going back to Sam’s Club on Saturday, in the original flat, with the receipt, and I will be the one returning them, because Garrett has “a relationship” with the manager and I do not, which means I am the only person in this household capable of looking a stranger in the eye and saying the word barium out loud.