RED…WHITE…BOOM!!!

One of the great joys for me is firing off ‘the canon’, which sits faithfully on my roll-top desk most all year. There are really only two times a year that I can do it successfully, (without getting arrested,) the 4^th of July and New Year’s Eve. You have to understand that at 63 years old, there is still a lot of kid in me and I get a bang (literally) from shooting it off!

The canon, about 14 inches in length and weighs a ton, is a hand made replica of one of the guns that sits on the gun deck on the Constitution (“Old Ironsides”), that wonderful old ship that resides in Boston Harbor. An interesting side note, once a year, the ship gets turned around, so that it weathers on both sides equally.

This particular canon was hand crafted by a gentleman in Marblehead, Massachusetts, who made about 15 or 20 of these for special friends and family. It would take him the better of a year to craft one, lovingly taking his time to make sure that the specifications were exactly to scale. The barrel is hand-turned from a solid piece of brass and the carriage is made from cherry wood. The canon can either fire 10 gauge shotgun blank shells or can be stuffed with wadding. (I prefer firing the blanks.)

In celebratory style we dragged it out and let loose just at dusk on July 4^th and what a blast we had, as always. The damn thing can be heard from two miles away…better than any ‘cherry bomb’ that I ever set off!