5:30am | You’re never more than six months away from a fireworks display in Long Beach. Every Fourth of July and every New Year’s Eve, the Queen Mary treats all comers to meaty display of colorful explosions over water.
And so, twice a year, thousands upon thousands of us seek out The Perfect Spot.
Even for those of us without access to watercraft, any number of locations provide choice viewing angles: dozens of rooftops, miles of surfless beach, Rainbow Harbor, hundreds of south-facing balconies, a few choice parks or bluffs. Not to mention Signal Hill, a vantage point from which you can see dozens of fireworks displays happening all over the southland.
But the Perfect Spot isn’t about a physical locus. If you clicked on this looking for a list of “the best places in Long Beach to see fireworks,” you’ve come to the wrong place.
Or maybe you’re right where you’re supposed to be.
I had yet to become a Long Beach resident New Year’s Eve 2003, but a friend living at 1728 E. 3rd St. had a party, and I took in the fireworks from his rooftop. It was one of those wooden, art-deco buildings from the ’20s or ’30s that you hope no one will ever tear down. It’s only three storeys, but around there that’s plenty high. Up on top there’s that dappled roof surface the color of cement. The roof had no guardrail, allowing for those anxious moments when you feel you have too much freedom in the world. At the south end there was a portion that raised up to 45 degrees (presumably serving some architectural purpose — what, I have no idea). With great care I perched myself there, comfortably supine in the early moments of 2004.
The fireworks, though, were beside the point. It was the people, the friends, the atmosphere that made this The Perfect Spot. The calendar date and explosions in the sky were a handy excuse, a compass that had helped me arrive.
Fast-forward a few years, and for the first time I joined the masses thronging on Shoreline Aquatic Park for a Long Beach-style Independence Day. I like warm weather and loosely-formed crowds, so for me, in that moment, this was The Perfect Spot. I desired nothing other than to be right there, waiting for the fireworks. I stood stock still and took in the scene, the little lighthouse beam intermittently washing over me in a seeming prelude to transformation before passing on without effect.
While walking out to our little harbor isthmus I had caught myself looking at the patch of sky where I believed the fireworks would be. It was some sort of habitual anticipation, I suppose, and I reminded myself not to project onto the future, because in so doing I would miss some of what I might glean from the present: the simple sonic wash of the Aquarium fountain (anything but simple when you let yourself listen), the complex spectacle of the gathering crowd.
It was too crowded for bicycle-riding, and clearly those who had ridden two-wheelers down there would have been better off — as well as more thoughtful to the herd of pedestrians — walking them. But in many an obtuse stubbornness prevailed. They had brought them, and they were damn well going to ride them, a preconceived idea of enjoyment interfering with the reality of what would be enjoyable in practice.
During the entirety of the fireworks display a 14-year-old next to me talked into a cell phone, the conversation of no consequence to the moment and nothing that could not have been better conducted away from aerial pyrotechnics and earthbound reactions.
A family of five had set up on a gentle hillside: blanket, chairs, cooler, and an unobstructed view. But the paterfamilias was uprooting them all. “We’ll try 30 yards farther up,” he said, folding a chair, “and if we can’t do any better, then that’s that.” It seemed a discontent had been bred into him, a restlessness always to search for something better, and here he was passing that ethos down the generational line. He meant well, no doubt, but he reckoned The Perfect Spot to be about place.
Some people talk of utopia without realizing that the word itself was coined by Thomas More from Greek words meaning “not place.” There are no utopias on the map.
The Perfect Spot can come in many forms, probably none of which have much to do with preconception. It’s an inward settling where you lack desire, a moment when your entire being is focused in a place that nothing compels you to leave. It can be found in physical or conversational intimacy, in meditation or prayer, in blissful inebriation or sober clarity, in dance or sport, in sleep or the keenest conscious focus, in watching film or fireworks. But it does not reside inherently in any where or what.
A holiday is not inherently a holy day; it is only what you make of it, as with every other day. So whatever you’re doing Monday night, may you make and find The Perfect Spot, and return there often, wherever you roam.