With last Friday being July 4th, I decided to take a week off from posting. However, I wanted to share a story from that night (or, really, early the next morning).
Backing up, last year, we learned that our neighbors loved fireworks. So we were prepared for a few hours of noise and helping our pup deal with it. This eventually died down and, around 12:30 a.m. or so, we decided to call it a night. But, nearly as soon as we slid into our bed, we started to hear several loud booms, and not from the direction of our neighbor’s house. Instead, we peered out the window to see a dozen or so teens setting off fireworks in the nearby parking lot.
Mind you, they weren’t shooting off fireworks — they were lighting them and either throwing them or just running away. As annoying as this was, it wasn’t until I saw a couple of teens peel off and walk our backyard that I got heated. Immediately, I headed downstairs to ensure that I was seeing what I thought I was.
Naively, I thought that simply putting the back light on would cause them to scurry away. For a second, I thought this worked as I didn’t see anyone in the yard and thought maybe I just had a weird angle from my window. But, when my wife stepped out to see what was going on, she found a few of them had indeed come onto our yard and were trying to light something… I guess to show their friends a different angle? This seemed like a great idea since, in contrast to the paved parking lot, our backyard has vegetation and, more importantly, power lines — and this was just a few days removed from a massive power outage in our city!
Naturally, my wife asked what they were doing, to which they replied that they were “just having fun, ma’am.” When she stated that they couldn’t be in our yard, they stepped over into our neighbor’s yard. Clever. Meanwhile, another teen came across the yard and hopped the fence into our other neighbor’s yard. The motive for this plan also remains unclear.
Thankfully, while the chaos didn’t really escalate from there and they eventually peeled out about 20 minutes later, in addition to feeling extremely annoyed and angry (it took me a decent amount of time to calm down and fall asleep after), I just felt old. In fact, I’ve been feeling that a lot lately — after all, I’m six months away from having to retire this website name as I’ll be 40 come January.
I’m the type of person who thinks back on his past mistakes often and literally cringes. Hell, my wife has caught me swearing at myself on more than one occasion, only to learn that what I was upset about was something dumb I said or even thought 20 years ago. With that in mind, I can only hope and assume that these teens will think back on this event in a decade or so and realize how dumb they were being.
So what does this have to do with money? Admittedly, not much, on the surface. However, just as we can all relate to thinking we know better, making mistakes, and looking back with regret, those experiences can also happen to us with finances. Also, while I didn’t think this story quite fit into my first-time homebuyer series, this was certainly a unique milestone as a homeowner!
To reiterate, nothing was really damaged and no one was hurt, so this little incident has a relatively happy ending. Yet, it’s something I’ll be thinking about for a while as I continue to consider my own ever-evolving maturity as it relates to several areas of my life. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — but I’ll say I still prefer quiet reflection to loud explosions.