Resignation

You may have heard, I resigned from my job on Monday. Not the job that pays (some of) the bills... I still have that job. No, I resigned from the job that each year around the 4th of July would bring me joy and happiness like no job I’ve ever had (not counting the years I was a camp councilor at Coach Hatley’s baseball camps). This was the kind of job that brought me so much happiness that I knew it was only a matter of time before The Wife would make me resign. I tried to buy myself some time by talking about what hard work it was (and there was hard work involved), but alas, I could not hide the joy that filled my eyes whenever the subject would come up. Of course I am talking about my job working fireworks shows in the Atlanta area of Georgia (which, if you’re like me, is anywhere outside of the Savannah area of Georgia). I wish I could give you an exact location but I really don’t know. I think maybe Sugar Hill was one (but I might be thinking that because I’m listening to the Sugar Hill Gang right now). I worked this gig for two years. Each year there were two shows (one big one that took a long time to set up because it was all electrically fired and one smaller show where we would hand fire most of it). The first show was always fun because we had a lot of people (around 7 or 8) working and work seems to be more fun when you have more people. Plus, we would have time in-between the set-up and the show to just hang out and laugh and relax. The second night consisted of 4 of us going to shoot a show at a very nice golf course while the other 4 went to shoot a show at a church. The golf course group was: a supervisor (my brother Kevin, aka “Sonny” if you’ve been following this blog), my sister-in-law Terry (older than Kevin), myself, and a random guy we’d pick up who at least looked like he didn’t have a record. While the show wasn’t as big as the first night, it was still a good bit of hard work because it was just 4 of us working it. Anyway, shooting this show was great because it was hand fired. The first year, as a way to “protect” me, Sonny made my main job be “reloader”. See, we didn’t have enough tubes for all the shells we had to shoot, so after he and the random guy without a record (we assume) would fire a shell it was my job to reload the tube. This, I thought, was a great way to keep me safe (as I ran back and forth reloading tubes while carrying shells with sparks falling all around me). Around the end of that show I was allowed to light some shells myself. Sonny gave me some great advice as I was going to my first one: “Don’t stand over the tube as you light the shell”. Thanks for the heads up on that one! If he said anything to me after I shot that first shell I have no idea, because once I lit it that sucker went BOOM and my hearing left me for about a year and a half (that’s how we ended up with Scooby... I had no idea what The Wife was saying when she asked if we could have him). I learned the next year to wear double ear protection (which worked great). Last year I got to shoot the whole time (in the middle of a thunder storm) which is something I think every man should do at least once in his life. I was really looking forward to doing it again this year, but The Wife forced my resignation. Fortunately my supervisor was very gracious when I sent him my resignation letter. So our lesson today is: Find something you love... then do your best to hide it from your spouse. :-)