Throughout my childhood in Utah in the 1990s, my family had a large metal bowl, usually reserved for popcorn or bland potato salad made for our gargantuan family reunions.
Everyone in the neighborhood had this same bowl. No one knew where these came from, nor could any remember when they showed up. The same thing went for our white Astro vans and those red-striped picnic blankets we summoned every summer — all staples of ‘90s Utah Latter-day Saint homes.
I fished out the metal bowl on Independence Day 1994, two months after I turned 10. Mom had begun making her neighborhood-famous caramel in a heavy-bottom saucepan, stirring it in professional diligence so as not to allow it to burn. My sisters and I sat on stools at the kitchen counter, watching in delight.
This was our routine, our ritual. We all had fresh sunburns from spending the morning overreacting to our underwhelming town parade that included cosplaying revolutionary soldiers in costumes assembled from a dollar store. Members of my pale Irish-descended family hadn’t worn sunscreen. We were putting our futures into God’s hands.
After the parade, we met our cousins, aunts and uncles at a park for a large family picnic. Dad handed us watermelon triangles he had sliced that morning. Mom poured watered-down Kool-Aid (why was it always watered down?) into our paper cups. We spent hours getting tetanus on the playground’s long metal slides that were the temperature of hell itself. We ripped our skin off our knees as we carefully crawled atop the nearly serrated monkey bars that were just high enough off the compacted sand that not even the strongest among us could survive a fall. We climbed aboard one of those roundabouts with rusted metal poles as our older cousins spun us into permanent vertigo and concussions.
We never wanted to leave. Eventually, though, we made our way home so mom could start making caramel.
Mom turned from the stove, now holding the saucepan and actively stirring its contents. My oldest sister was in charge of popping so much popcorn that you could see it from space. She used the brown-and-mustard-color PopLite popcorn maker my parents had received as a wedding gift in 1976 — an appliance still in active rotation among their almost exclusively vintage repertoire of kitchen amenities. I’m certain this PopLite will outlast the Giza pyramids.
Pops and popcorn
(Joe Keller | America's Test Kitchen via AP) This photo provided by America's Test Kitchen buttered popcorn. Tribune columnist Eli McCann remembers the caramel popcorn balls his mother made.
There was almost no greater Pavlovian response from my childhood than hearing the sound of the first kernel ricocheting in the PopLite. It usually meant it was a Sunday night and my family, like every family in the neighborhood and perhaps country, was getting ready to gather and watch whatever made-for-TV movie or miniseries was about to premiere on ABC.
“Who the hell is calling us right now?” Dad would yell if ever the landline rang during these sacred hours.
There was no way to pause the program. No way to rewind. We’d let the call go to an answering machine — a device from the future we had incorporated into our home only a few years before. We had all gathered around Dad as he nervously recorded the outgoing message, like he was King George VI delivering his landmark radio address at the cusp of World War II.
Mom began slowly pouring the steaming caramel over the hot popcorn in the metal bowl, using a large wooden spoon in her other hand to begin mixing it. Minutes later, she had formed 4-inch balls, set to cool on a warped baking sheet (another immortal, although embattled, wedding gift). They would be hard as diamonds by night’s end.
Just as the sun set, we pulled our beach chairs to the driveway and the red-striped picnic blanket to the front lawn. Dad began opening the cheap variety pack of wispy fireworks he had purchased from the pop-up stand in the Ream’s parking lot at the end of the street. Every father in the neighborhood had bought this same pack — well, besides that one rumored family a few blocks away that had smuggled in military-grade weapons, probably from some cartel.
The families up and down the street started making their way toward our house, carrying their own beach chairs and red-striped blankets, deciding we might as well consolidate the firework display, especially considering the likelihood that half our supplies were statistically duds. Our house was the gathering place, probably because of the large metal bowl of now-cooled popcorn balls that had made its way to the festivities.
This happened every year, but it always felt spontaneous.
Makeshift block parties
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Fireworks are sold in 2015.
The kids ran amok, occasionally scolded by the army of neighborhood dads who, for the price of $19.99 each, were channeling their most militant instincts to re-create the Revolutionary War on our suburban street.
“You’re going to burn your eyebrows off,” one of them shouted as an undeterred 6-year-old hopped over one of those lit blue spinners that probably had a name none of us knew.
The teens gathered on the picnic blankets, whispering about whatever it was teens found interesting back then.
A 10-year-old was chipping his teeth on his fifth popcorn ball.
One of the moms could be heard to say, “You know, we have this same metal bowl at home.”
Eventually, the display dwindled, and the parents circled their beach chairs to engage in grown-up conversation while the children instigated a game of tag in the dark. Echoes of pops and cracks could still be heard. Off in the distance, we caught obscured glimpses of a professional firework show at some park miles away.
All these years later, I still think there’s no better sound than the general background noise of neighbors being neighbors — the simple hum of a people gathered, sans devices and distractions, satisfied by company and the shared community that company builds.
Social media, some politicians and many other of the loudest voices would have us sometimes believe these scenes are no more — that division and exclusion are the norm.
But I think most people are the type to sit on beach chairs and laugh together. The type to gladly ruin their dental work on someone else’s homemade caramel popcorn. The type to gather without invitation, almost instinctively, before packing it all up and heading home, looking forward to next year when they get to do it all again.
(Pat Bagley) Eli McCann, Salt Lake Tribune guest columnist.
Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband and their two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs. You can find Eli on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @EliMcCann or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com, where he tries to keep the swearing to a minimum so as not to upset his mother.
Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
