When The Lightning Struck
I wasn’t there when the lightning struck the top of the fireworks stand out on HW 80, the year we were broke and had lost our apartment. Peddling silver salutes and cherry bombs was a dream come true. We started selling three weeks before the 4th and slept on the grass of our locked fireworks stand. Each night after we closed at midnight, I put the cash box in a hole I dug near my sleeping bag and covered it with a box.
We were hippies then, in our late twenties, peddling rockets and silver salutes. We hoped to take in enough cash to spend spring and summer in the mountains near Santé Fe, New Mexico, on national forest land.
I’d taken the pickup to get change at the bank. Katherine ran out the back door when the lightning struck with a boom, and high up the structure began to burn. Everything we had tumbled off the shelves, but not one rocket took flight or one firecracker snapped, crackled or popped. Nothing even smoked. The fire up top on the Mr. W sign went out by itself.
Katherine said she was rather disappointed by such a tepid divine intervention. There should have been a bigger show, happenings more impressive. It sprinkled dribbles of rain only a minute or two.
She waited for about ten minutes, went back inside the stand, cleaned things up, and waited for the cars to start pulling in. The lot had been empty with the lightning hit. I thought that was divine intervention enough.
Soon Katherine was again smiling and selling.
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