On not going to see the fireworks

It's the Fourth of July, a couple hours before midnight. On the roof, my neighbors are watching fireworks go off down the river at Oaks Park and up the river in downtown at the Blues Festival and, if it's clear, across the Columbia in Vancouver, not to mention all the do-it-yourself sparkles all over Portland.

I'm not. I can barely hear the explosions, so I know that fireworks are being set off. (At my old place, the fireworks went off practically overhead, so I definitely knew when they were happening. My current cat, a courageous soul, was never freaked out about it, though my previous cat ran and hid under the bed.) And it's satisfying to me to think there are people enjoying them, looking up at the bursting fiery flowers overhead, going "Oooo!" and "Aaaah!". There is in me history of having done that. And it is enough. It is as if I could reach into my own past and touch the wonder and excitement and enchantment with burning blues and reds and golds and whites -- and,more recently, greens and purples -- and feel the appetite for them satisfied, knowing that the same experience is happening again right now.

Which means either I am gaining depth and resonance in my old age, or I am too damned lazy to put on some shoes and walk down to the elevator that would take me to the roof.