It’s the 4th of July. In the empty lot by the playground, a group of Bangladeshi teenagers are setting off professional-grade fireworks. Bang, bang! BANG! Bang, whiz. Bang-bang! Sometimes one fails to go off properly; everyone steps back until it’s spent itself into the asphalt. A group of 30 or 40 people, families with kids, black white whatever, watches from a safe distance. A couple of kids on bikes go round and round. At one point it seems like the fireworks are finished; then a group of three laughing girls, none more than ten, carry in a big box together, and the show starts up again.
In front of the bodega next to Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 8160, three old men sit out on the sidewalk on folding chairs. If there’s anything worth seeing, they’ll probably see it. The well-fed bodega cat rambles between them. Next door is a taco place that’s converted an old schoolbus into an outdoor dining shed.
There’s no traffic, for some reason. A few blocks from the playground, a couple of Italian families set off rows of big sparklers right in the street, scrupulously spraying them down with the garden hose afterward.
A block further there’s a building with several Mexican families, who all summer hold multigenerational parties out on the sidewalk: folding chairs, cooler, grill, kiddie pool. Next door is the bodega run by Octavio and Rosario from Oaxaca, where my kids have gone alone for eggs and milk and lemons since they were six. Tonight’s party is bigger than usual, fifty or sixty people ranging from toddlers to grandparents or great grandparents. The teens and tweens play soccer in the street, slowly and reluctantly giving way when the occasional car needs to get through.
The last call to prayer comes from the mosque at the corner, struggling to be heard over the cacophony. Now here’s another group setting off unlicensed fireworks. The seven year old joins up with a stranger girl his own age to run off for a better view; it’s fine, they know better than to cross the street.
The moon is just past half, waxing. A drone wobbles overhead, someone struggling to control it. A helicopter whirls past; it has nothing to do with us. Who knows where the police are — elsewhere, anywhere, not here tonight.
Down here in Brooklyn, it is still America.