Why I’ve Come to Hate the Fireworks I Used to Love

I dread the Fourth of July for the sake of my dog and the veterans its noises terrify

Photo by Jingda Chen on Unsplash

On the Fourth of July 2025 I laid on a couch inside my lake house in Massachusetts, television blaring to cover the sounds of explosions. Outside the windows that look out onto the water, the sky popped with bright whites accented by blues and greens and purples. I crossed my arms and wondered what exactly we were celebrating.

My husband walked up behind me, stretched out on the floor beside the couch. He’d just come from checking on our greyhound Champ, who was shaking in our bedroom. When the first boom happened thirty minutes ago, we sat lakeside. Champ raised his head toward the sky, his lean body tensing in the gloaming’s light.

“It’s okay, buddy,” we said, before he raced to the door to be let in, so he could hustle to his cage in our room, its floor covered in pillows and blankets.

My husband reported: When he put his hand on Champ’s chest, Champ’s heart throbbed against his palm, as if a boogeyman were coming for him.

As I took my turn lying on the floor outside Champ’s cage, rubbing his forehead, I thought of my client and friend Ace, and how fireworks landed for him.

In 2012, I opened a law practice dedicated to disability law. Early on, I connected with the VA hospitals in Massachusetts and found work as a guardian to veterans without any family to fill the role. It was the softer side of disability law, advocating for clients within the healthcare system. In 2014 I met Ace, a Vietnam vet estranged from his only living son. Ace needed help after a female friend of his, a neighbor he fell in love with, stole his money through dozens of ATM withdrawals from his bank account, until $60,000 was gone. Rather than a guardian who helps with medical issues, I was appointed as Ace’s conservator, to deal with financial matters.

It was a fairly easy case in many ways: The woman was caught on security footage at the ATMs over and over, using Ace’s stolen card. I hired a litigator to get the money back from Bank of America, which succeeded. I drove Ace to the district court so he could speak to the grand jury that ultimately found the woman criminally liable.

I worked for Ace for the next four years before he passed in 2018. We moved him into a group home with other vets in Plymouth, Massachusetts. He liked me to visit him once a month—we’d get lunch at his favorite local seafood restaurant, where he’d chat with the waitresses, asking them about their lives outside their shifts. I paid for our lunches with his funds, and he’d always ask me to leave a 25% tip. After lunch we grabbed coffees at the Dunkin’ across the street, where he insisted I leave five-dollar tips even if our order cost three bucks.

Some visits I’d take him to spend his money on himself, buying him a cushy recliner for his room, a new mattress. At Kohl’s he tried on new jeans, asking for my help to tug them up over his protruding belly. Ace was about 65 at the time. The lithium the VA treated his PTSD with after he returned from active duty had caught up to Ace, and his kidneys began to fail in the second year I worked with him.

The group home where he lived with a dozen other vets had seen this lithium-consequence many times before, and it was fairly easy to get their help to bring him to dialysis appointments during the week.

Ace hated dialysis at first, but eventually in our phone calls and visits, he talked about the kind nurses he met who seemed to like his jokes. Ace’s usual commitment to making those around him feel at ease had no doubt come into play. He always liked supporting other vets, too; anytime we were out in the world and passed someone with a veteran hat or shirt, he stopped to talk to them, forging a connection usually in seconds. He called them brother or sister, always disengaging with a “See you later, buddy.”

My husband enjoyed my stories of my time with Ace, about this straight veteran and his Queer, early-forties husband chatting over grilled salmon. I never really came out to Ace, my private life intentionally walled-off from my professional one, where I constantly turned conversations back to my clients. I have good reason to think that Ace would not have cared that I am Queer. When Caitlyn Jenner came out as trans in 2015, I met up with him not long after. He mentioned Jenner’s coming out, and commented on how brave it was of her, knowing that she’d likely face all kinds of backlash. Ace was never big on talking down about others, especially anyone struggling—it was one of my favorite things about him.

He told me, and anyone who would listen, about the action he saw during the war, the buddies he saw die, the bodies he saw felled in Vietnam. He was proud of his service, but admitted that the memories haunted his every day.

Every year that I knew him, around the second or third of July, he called me to warn, “I’m gonna go into hiding for a little while, until after the fireworks.”

The fireworks landed too much like war. The noise met his body in ways indistinguishable from hostility. His heart raced, he sweat, he returned to a different century and country within himself. During the early part of each July, he hid in his room, closed the blinds, cranked up the volume on his TV, as the America outside supposedly acknowledged the freedom he fought for, and its celebratory explosions dinged Ace to his core.

I’d never thought much about fireworks. In my life before then, they happened once a year on the Fourth of July, and usually my family and I, minus my father, drove a couple towns over from our own to see a show. I watched them at Disney World and Euro Disney as a kid and teenager, mildly interested in how they looked in the sky, anticipating the finale when my senses would overwhelm from the colors, whistles, and pops—my whole vision-scape filled. It felt like there was nothing in the world but fireworks for a brief moment. My body handled the event without calling back to a scarier place. Now I wonder, while my siblings and I watched the displays, whether my father holed up at home like Ace did.

My father was a vet, too, of the Korean War, but served domestically. His childhood, however, was riddled with conflict. When he was a ten-year old away at summer camp outside of Minsk, Belarus, in 1941, the Nazis invaded his country. He learned of the war first when a Luftwaffe plane descended from the sky on what he thought was just another day and shot at him. He survived by running, and would do so many times over during the war that defined the next four years of his life, until it ended in 1945. In that time, he outran death over and over. On one occasion, when he slept through the air raid sirens meant to prompt him to run to a bomb shelter, he only woke when the bombs outside his window exploded his bedroom windows inward, the shattered glass finally waking him and reminding him to run for his life.

I wonder now, did the fireworks his children gleefully set out to watch remind his body of the life he survived, and prevent him from piling into the car with us?

I worked with a handful of veteran clients during my time as a lawyer, becoming similarly close to them as I did with Ace. All three disappeared around the Fourth of July, isolating from a world that didn’t seem to care much how the fireworks affected them, even if the fireworks were allegedly supposed to celebrate what these men had offered up their lives to protect.

I can’t imagine an America that will ever grapple with or dismantle the yearly celebration that involves fireworks. Not for environmental reasons, not because they scare and negatively affect people and animals. The America I know doesn’t care about that. It’ll say “Thank you for your service” but “Fuck you and your broken nervous system” from the same mouth. It’s a country with little tolerance for inconveniences or critical thought about its traditions. It’s a country that, for the most part, will send a boy to war and not care how that war lives in him afterward.

I used to enjoy sitting on the edge of the lake during the fireworks. Sometimes my friends and I would float in inner tubes during the show or circle our chairs at the big end of our dock. One part of the sky lit up as a neighbor set off fireworks, before a neighbor on another part of the lake answered in kind, our heads pivoting from one patch of sky to another, emblazoned with violets and golds and bright whites or muted yellows.

Then I met Ace, and I thought of him more and more during the shows.

Then we adopted Champ in 2023, after the COVID pandemic showed me that there was a whole swath of the country not particularly interested in others’ needs if it inconvenienced them. I’m not equating retired racing greyhounds to veterans, I’m only noticing that they were two groups used to serve a purpose for others, and that their well-being doesn’t really have a place in a fireworks display.

It’s felt underscored in this decade that large numbers of my fellow citizens adhere to a “fuck you and your problems” mindset. That point of view burrowed deep into my soul, aggravating my scorn about indifference or hostility toward the needs of others, especially when those who need a little gentler, quieter world, are in the minority. Whatever connection to the excitement of fireworks I might have once had fizzled—like one of those faulty fireworks that takes to the sky, doesn’t light, and lands with a thud in the water below.

I ignored the 2025 fireworks from inside my house, until my husband reported on the disassociating dog I love, suffering in the other room. I took my turn sitting on the floor with Champ, rubbing his soft neck fur, readjusting the earmuffs my husband bought him this year, feeling him shudder as the fireworks reverberated through the floor and the world. My husband Dave crafted walls around Champ’s cage made from soundproof padding, ordered online. A sound machine on top of the cage blasted the sound of falling rain, an attempted cover-up of the loud blasts. We put old episodes of The Golden Girls on the TV; maybe Betty White could comfort Champ the way she always has me.

Champ panted, his tongue hanging from his mouth. I sat on the floor and talked to him, but he looked right through me. I offered him food, his favorite thing in the universe, but he ignored the cookie. I hoped the trazadone our vet prescribed him would kick in soon and take the edge off.

His cage, our love, the extra support: They help, I hope, but didn’t and don’t fix this for him. They are what I can do to counter the fear felt by the living creature I love, now that my father and Ace are both gone.

I wondered where I can bring Champ on future Fourth of Julys, to get away from this aspect of America that I have grown to detest. There was no joy for me anymore in the performance going on outside, a hypocritical pride for a country that doesn’t care how its booms hurt living beings. If our most vulnerable are afraid of the performance, then what’s the point?

I got on my belly and tried to connect with the dog who was already somewhere else, like he didn’t see me at all.

“Hey, buddy,” I said, using Ace’s words, hoping I might cut through the noise and the reverberations, and on some level, at least let him know that we care.

Jason Prokowiew won the 2023 PEN America/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, a Fulbright Scholar Award, and the Aurora Polaris Prize for Nonfiction for War Boys, his braided memoir about his Russian father’s adoption by Nazis during World War II and the trauma his father carried into parenthood. His writing has appeared in The North American Review, Under the Sun, The Guardian, Salon, Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series, “The Audacity,” WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Brevity, Business Insider, and on PBS/WORLD Channel’s Stories from the Stage. His Stories from the Stage piece, “Sing,” has over 2.6 million views on Facebook and is the most viewed in the show’s history. His essay “The Demulcent of Shame,” originally published by Roxane Gay, won the 2023 Lascaux Prize for Creative Nonfiction. He’s received additional support from Bread Loaf, Ucross, Tin House, Ragdale, and the Mass Cultural Council. A recovering disability attorney, he lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband Dave and their greyhound Champ.

Find out more at www.jasonwprokowiew.com