My husband and I enjoyed a two-day jaunt to SF, which included an opera, a band concert, and of course fireworks, in fact, two simultaneous fireworks displays.

The sun set at 8:31. While waiting for nautical twilight near Fisherman’s Wharf, I sent a Snapchat of the Golden Gate Bridge encased in fog, which is to say, a Snapchat of Fog. At two miles distance, rising over 700 feet from the water, the bridge can be a striking sight from this site. When we arrived, one of the towers was still peeking through the clouds, but that eye soon winked shut.

The bridge’s roadway averages 220 feet above the water, not that we could see it, but we visit often and could picture it. I estimate the aviator’s ceiling was about 400 feet. The rockets streaked from the barges into the clouds, which were shortly filled with luminous, colorful radiance from within, reminiscent of a Degas painting, then rained pastel glow-globes gracefully into the water. The nearly identical displays took place directly ahead and to the right, in slightly differing atmospheric conditions, providing a myriad of views and effects, even from identical sources.

My first reaction was disappointment, which is a reminder that my attachment to expectations often causes me to miss a transformative moment. Certainly it wasn’t the usual brilliant, high-definition display, yet the visuals were striking, unique, almost other-worldly. My husband found the ambiguous display much more affecting, which was another bonus, a reward to him for accompanying me to a perhaps wearying series of such pyrotechnics multiple times annually over the several decades of our union.

It’s almost surprising that we haven’t experienced the fog fireworks before now.

The concomitant music and patriotic quotations blaring from the speakers were unsoftened by the weather conditions, and as a result seemed even more bombastic. What freedoms, the smudgy, pastel motes seemed to whisper, do you really have, you who don’t want to be threatened by ubiquitous firearms, to obey the strictures of religion, to ingest toxic water and air, to seek nourishment in robo-food? These choices are no longer yours to make.