They call Pompano Beach “Florida’s Warmest Welcome.” Starting the last Monday in May, the welcome is explosive. Literally.
Memorial Day is not the problem. Memorial Day is the starting gun. What follows is a three-month intermittent fireworks program that nobody scheduled, nobody announced, and nobody asked you about. Delivered with the consistency of a car alarm. The precision of a blindfolded man throwing rocks. From your backyard. At nine PM. On a Tuesday.
Last night, just after nine, the first one went off. Not a display. Not a finale. One. A single confident explosion, followed by a pause long enough to let you believe it was over. Then three more, from entirely different directions, because the neighborhood does not coordinate but it is absolutely committed. You sat there doing the math on how many backyards were involved. The number did not improve your evening.
That is how the season opens. Not with a bang. With several. At intervals that suggest the person responsible has never finished a sentence in their life.
There is a subset of fireworks that deserves its own mention. Not the ones that climb into the sky and produce a shower of color and light. Those at least have the decency to put on a show. These are the ones that simply explode. No trail. No color. No visual component of any kind. Just a single, massive, concussive bang that serves no purpose other than to announce that an explosion has occurred. They are called report shells. The entire product is the noise. Someone looked at the concept of fireworks and decided the pretty part was unnecessary. That person lives in your neighborhood. You have heard their work.
From here, the calendar becomes a rough draft. The Fourth of July arrives, and by arrives I mean the surrounding two weeks, because the Fourth is technically a date but functionally more of a general direction. It peaks around eleven PM on the actual Fourth, when whoever bought the professional-grade mortars from the folding table in the Walmart parking lot decides the time has come to protect their investment. That is not an exaggeration. The table was there. The sign said FIREWORKS in letters readable from the turning lane. The man behind it had found his calling in a parking lot between the garden center and the cart return. He was not there to move sparklers.
By June there will be fireworks on a Thursday. Not a holiday. Not a birthday, or if it is, that person has chosen a genuinely immersive way to celebrate. Not the anniversary of anything recognized by any government, religion, or loosely organized civic body on this continent. Someone had fireworks and a Thursday and saw no reason to keep them apart. You will hear the first one from your couch, run a rapid internal audit of every upcoming American holiday, come up completely empty, and ultimately accept that South Florida runs on its own calendar and your subscription lapsed before it started.
Florida actually wrote this down. The state identified three days when residential fireworks are legal. New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Day. July 4th. That is the complete list. It fits on a Post-it note with room for a grocery list. And even on those three days, the noise ordinance still applies. The exemption is for fireworks. Not for whatever time you feel like setting them off. Memorial Day is not on the list. The Thursday in June is not on it. Late July, when someone moves something in the garage and finds the box, is not on it. Three days. The legislature was extremely clear. The neighborhood has chosen not to be.
I want to be clear that none of this is a complaint about Memorial Day itself. Memorial Day is a real holiday with a real meaning and I have no argument with it. This is a complaint about what Memorial Day means to a specific subset of my neighbors, which is: permission. Permission for a season. The season permissions the Thursdays. The Thursdays permission the leftover box in late July, when every reasonable person has moved on but the box is right there on the garage shelf and a man who found his calling between the garden center and the cart return did not sell it to be ignored.
You will not know when the season ends. There is no closing ceremony. No announcement. No one sends a card. Sometime in late July the Thursdays stop, the weekends thin out, and one evening you will sit outside for an uninterrupted forty minutes and realize with actual disorientation that nothing has exploded. You will wait another ten minutes just to confirm. The season closed exactly the way it opened. Without notice. Without coordination. Without a single acknowledgment that you were involved.
Until September, when someone moves something in the garage and finds the box.
