The Observer’s daughter turned 16 in February. She’s never been much of a shopper or expressed any real interest in money, so I was a bit surprised when she told me she wanted to get a summer job. Nevertheless, when I saw that the Arkansas Travelers were hiring for the season, I sent her the link.
I didn’t expect her to apply, and certainly not right away, but that’s exactly what she did. She told them she wanted to work in the playground/splash pad area with little kids, and she proudly informed me that she was hired “pretty much immediately.”
Thursday night, July 4, while the Travelers were playing in Frisco, the organization opened Dickey-Stephens Park to anyone who wanted to watch Fourth of July fireworks over the Arkansas River while eating a ballpark hot dog. When my daughter’s boss asked who would be willing and able to work the kids’ zone that night, she volunteered. I asked if she was sure she wanted to work on a holiday. “It’s two more hours for my next paycheck,” she said. Hard to argue with that, I guess.
She, my fiancée Jess and I drove to Dickey-Stephens together on Thursday evening and got there early enough to get a spot on Willow Street, facing the fence behind the scoreboard above left field, where we could see most of the field and the crowd. My daughter went in to start her shift, and Jess and I stayed behind. Given the heat and humidity, we took advantage of the free admission and went in only long enough to get hot dogs and drinks, then returned to the car to listen to the Travelers’ game on the radio while enjoying the wonders of modern automotive air conditioning.
For an hour after the gates opened at 7 p.m., kids and adults could play catch on the outfield grass. If you squinted just right through the humidity and orange-red rays of sunset, you could almost make out an America that only ever existed in Norman Rockwell paintings and Baby Boomers’ fever dreams.
Before my daughter left the car, we’d all discussed whether to stay for fireworks after she returned. The general consensus among the three of us was, “Eh … doesn’t matter to me.” No one seemed particularly excited, but no one was opposed either. (That’s frequently how things go with a 16-year-old.)
Just before she finished her two-hour shift, however, I was overcome with a wave of … sadness, I guess? It wasn’t really nostalgia, at least in the modern sense. I wasn’t pining for some memory of watching fireworks with my parents when I was a teenager; I was remembering those old days fondly and grieving a hypothetical future, 30 years from now, in which my daughter didn’t have similar memories to reflect upon.
Oh, sure, she’d seen fireworks before. There are plenty of pictures of her sitting on my shoulders at two and three years old, watching brightly colored explosions. But between a divorce and a pandemic, plus the inertia that comes from letting things fall by the wayside, we hadn’t really made it a point to see Fourth of July fireworks in recent years. So I made the executive decision that we were going to stay and watch these.
Anyone watching the fireworks show without sudden emotional baggage would have found it to be just about the perfect length for a pyrotechnics display. As my daughter reached over and squeezed my hand during the grand finale, however, I found myself wishing the whole thing — the fireworks, the moment, her days of being a kid without the pressures of adulthood — would go on forever. But when the final red, white and blue streaks gave way to the night sky, I realized that the sadness I’d felt just 15 minutes earlier had given way to the kind of happiness that only shows up when your heart is truly full.
This whole thing isn’t directly related to Travelers baseball, I suppose. But, then again, in an alternative timeline in which we aren’t Travelers fans, I probably never send her the link to the open job position, and we likely don’t wind up there on a humid, non-game night to watch fireworks that we could have seen a bit better from other observation points.
In that situation, we almost certainly don’t find ourselves standing alone on a Willow Street sidewalk, sharing a moment that I hope she remembers forever.
I know I will.