The Good, the Bad, and the Fireworks

On Saturday night, we waited on a dock at Rock Harbour in Orleans to watch fireworks, and I saw examples of both the kind of behaviour I hate, and the kind I admire. The guy who worked at the marina, or maybe he was the harbourmaster, was busy puttering around the docks while more and more individuals filled up the space until we were sitting pretty much shoulder to shoulder along the wall above the dock. When he had finished his work, he wished to leave – going home was clearly a more appealing prospect than hanging around his place of employment with 2,000 strangers to watch fireworks he could probably see from his backyard. He had left his bicycle propped against the wall that we were now sitting on, and I watched him try to retrieve it in the midst of the throng of sunburned, bugspray coated summer folks sitting in folding chairs all along the dock. I watched the people in his way studiously ignore him. I watched them edge a little closer to the wall, so that they were even MORE in the way of this working-class man, who just wanted to ride his bike home and have a beer and a hot dog. The man sitting closest to him, the one who should have said, “excuse me,” and gotten up off his butt and folded up his chair for the moment it would have taken to let the bicycle out. Instead, he pretended nothing was happening. He made a point of not moving out of the way, and then glared as the bicycle guy tried to squeeze past him. HE was a jerk.

A row in front of the grey-haired polo-shirted asshole, and two seats down, sat a middle aged women prepared to enjoy the fireworks with her friends, husband, and children. They had a cooler and snacks, and the little girl kept hopping up on the wall next to us and then jumping back down. A little further along the wall, someone had left their cell phone. The woman got up, and maneuvered her way towards the wall (easier without the bicycle there) and picked up the phone. I watched her scroll through the numbers until she found one she wanted and dialed it. “Hello,” she said, “you don’t know me, but I think I’m calling on your daughter’s cell phone – she left it here on the dock.” She said she figured it was a daughter because the phone had butterflies for the wallpaper, and she called the name that said “mom”. A conversation ensued with the mother where they determined what the daughter was wearing, and where she had last been. It turned out that the daughter was sitting a couple of rows ahead on the dock, so the woman got up and gave her the phone. The girl was extremely grateful, and clearly felt like she had been a ditz, but the woman just shrugged like it was nothing. SHE was cool.

The fireworks were pretty awesome too (and put on by the town, not the religious cult that lives down there, as my mother feared). And the Red Sox won too!