A couple of weeks ago we celebrated Independence Day in America, complete with fireworks. This reminded me of when I was a youth and enjoyed setting off fireworks myself. I always found the instructions printed on fireworks rather amusing which said simply, "Put on ground, light fuse, run away." I didn't know exactly where they wanted me to run away to, I had already been to the circus, so I just stood back a few feet and watched the firecracker explode.

Fireworks drives mothers crazy, and I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard my mother warn me, "You can put your eye out that way." I think this was the standard warning for just about anything I did, be it riding a bicycle, playing baseball, swimming, running, or breathing. It is the first cardinal rule each mother must learn in order to bear children. I wasn't alone either, all of my friends' mothers admonished them with this same expression regularly. So much so, that we thought our mothers had formed a conspiracy or some secret society for the sole purpose of maintaining our eyesight.

The power of mothers is rather interesting. Years ago, Jay Leno commented that mothers had the uncanny ability to sniff out just about anything, even better than a bloodhound, such as your secret copy of Playboy you kept stashed away in your bedroom. Back before the Iraq war started, he said we should not have wasted time sending in a team of UN delegates to look for weapons of mass destruction since they never found anything. Instead, they should have sent in a team of mothers who would have pulled Saddam Hussein out by the ear and cleaned up the situation right away. It would have probably saved us all a lot of grief.

Mothers are full of little axioms they use to keep us in line, but I have to think, "You can put your eye out that way," has to be their favorite with "Stop it or you'll go blind" coming in a close second.