#154: The Sparklers
Flame as a friend or a fiend
Light, no one will be surprised to hear me say, has long been associated with what is ‘good’. And so it is also no surprise that the word ‘sparkle’ — to shine brightly with flashes of light (OED) — also has positive connotations. If a ring sparkles, we presume it is beautiful; if a person sparkles, we would like to meet them.
And yet there is a danger to ‘sparkling’, to shining brightly with flashes of light. It is erratic, hard to predict and possibly caused by flame; that ambiguous bringer of light and warmth, but also fear and destruction.
Maybe this duplicity is all part of my attraction to sparklers. I love them. Yet I also slightly fear them.
Maybe this attitude is absorbed from childhood bonfire nights, from gloves-on-stand-near-a-bucket policies. Maybe it is from the nightmare stories of bonfire nights gone wrong, drilled into us so that we hold our arms straight and keep our distance. Maybe it is the leaping of light, so beautiful and impossible to predict, that you both fear and wish that the light would reach out and touch you. Maybe it is the feeling of power, of grasping this bright, alive, searing object. What will you do with it?
The light creeps towards you. You wait for it to burn out.
Recently, a group of us slodged across a nearby field in the dark to light sparklers in honour of Katie’s birthday. There was snow on the ground as we stood overlooking the glow of the city. Katie began lighting matches one by one, trying to make the sparklers sparkle. The winter wind was against her. So we huddled in, forming a human barrier willing these unsuspecting pieces of metal to light up the night.
We huddled closer and closer, until eventually we were cupping our hands together around the very place we hoped sparks would soon fly. We had to remain poised, ready to jump back from our own success.
The sparklers caught and we cheered, thrusting in other sparklers to be lit by their brothers. It was a moment of triumph. We had, together, made the night sparkle. We had risked the flame and conquered it. And as we waved our wonderful wands, we had won.
