My ears have finally stopped ringing following my Lee’s Summit, Missouri, Independence Day celebration. This was the second year my grandchildren have been allowed to light the fireworks so of course they were very self sufficient.
    Over a two night run on Thursday and Friday, we had only one casualty and I was it. I was sitting in a vinyl chair on Pat’s patio watching the show. I leaned to one side of the chair to slide it. As I leaned the legs turned under, the chair tipped and I tumbled onto the patio and put a three inch scrape on my arm. It hardly broke the skin and bled only slightly. For all of two seconds Alec and Katrina were concerned about my welfare, but when they saw I was alive and standing upright it was back to the fireworks.
    The scrape produced an ugly scab and when I returned to work I told my fellow employees Pat and Amy took me to a tough bar in downtown Kansas City and I got knifed. They believed me for about the same duration as the kids were concerned about my fall.
    We had an uninvited guest for the fireworks on the fourth. A raccoon who lives in a small creek adjacent to Pat’s property makes occasional visits to Pat’s garbage cans. It seems he makes more stops when I am visiting. Pat claims the raccoon has a nicotine habit and knows there are cigarette butts in the garbage can when I am there. Anyway he tipped the garbage can while all of us were on the patio about 100 feet away blowing up a storm. The kids ran him back in some brush but he reappeared a few minutes later determined to get food and cigarettes from the can.
    This time Pat joined the chase and the critter crawled under a fence and went down the stream. We were concerned about the daylight visit and the possibility the raccoon was sick since they are nocturnal raiders. The rest of the display went off without a hitch and thankfully Pat had no garbage to pick up.