Ready, aim...

Fire.

This story starts out when I was four years old.

We all had chores when we were growing up, and my brother Butch had the chore of taking the trash out to the barrel and burning it. I would tag along becase I was fascinated by fire. I noticed that when he lit the fire, he would light Kleenex or newspaper to get it started.

I wanted to learn how fire worked. I convinced myself that if I could just take some Kleenex and matches into the barn, I'd be able to figure out this mysterious thing. So that's what I did.

I sat on the floor of the barn, laid the Kleenex on the floor, and started lighting matches. I was mesmerized by the spreading of the flame, and I kept looking at it, hoping that somehow it would reveal its secrets. What I failed to plan for was the fire spreading to the straw that was also on the floor.

I looked toward the wall of the south stable, and the flames were already licking the bottom of the wall. I ran outside to get the water hose, and as I sprayed water on the flames, they seemed to jump under the wall to the other side. So I went into the stable and sprayed from that side of the wall. The flames, naturally, jumped back to the other side.

At about that time, my sister Toni happened to be looking out the dining room window and told Mom that the barn was on fire. Mom ran out and promptly put the fire out. She gave me a look that I will never forget, and said she couldn't decide whether to spank me or to send me to bed without any supper. So she did both.

That was the first of many fires that I either started or encouraged. My brother Thom was a master at starting fires, and we used to dump gasoline on the ground and light it, imagining that hell would look something like that.

My day of reckoning came when I was a sophomore in high school. I stayed home from school one fall day, pretending I was sick. Late that morning, I decided to make something to eat, so I put a pan of oil on the stove to make some french fries. Then I went into the living room and nodded off.

I awoke to a crackling noise, and I assumed that Thom was sneaking into the house to see what I was up to. He had been in the shop all morning grading and packing apples. Imagine my surprise when I walked out of the living room and saw billows of smoke coming from the kitchen.

The flames were far too high and hot for me to do much. There was no fire extinguisher in the house, so I ran outside and started yelling for someone to come help. Fortunately, the neighbor across the road had a fire extinguisher, and he put the fire out. But the damage was done. Mom's new kitchen was a total loss, and the entire downstairs had smoke damage. The flames had been so hot that the drapes in the dining room melted.

A reporter from the local paper came out and took pictures of our burnt out kitchen, and one of those pictures made it into the Bellevue Gazette the following day. Mom was not amused.

It didn't take long for my friends at school to start with the arson jokes. Even my history teacher got into the act. We were studying the French Revolution, and he noted that it was good thing for Marie Antoinette that I wasn't locked up in the Bastille, because I would have burned my way out.

But all is well that ends well, and Mom was able to have her new kitchen replaced with a newer kitchen, and I learned never to leave a pan of boiling oil unattended.