Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Is it hot in here or is my head on fire?

If you ask me, fire is fun. I love it. Always have. My mom could never keep the matches away from me. We had those big boxes of 200 wooden matches. I'd find where Mom had hidden them and then I'd sneak off with them and have my fun, then get in lots and lots of trouble. But nothing could deter me.

Despite inevitable punishment(s) involved, my fascination with flame afforded me lots of practice and knowledge of the craft through trial and error. I could spend hours describing my various pyrosperiments as a youth. Indeed a disproportionate number of my "idiot stories" have to do with fire. This story is no exception.

As you might have inferred, I was undoubtedly something of a handful when I was younger. My older brother and sister were relatively well behaved and obedient children. It wasn't that I was maliciously bad or disobedient. I was a sweet kid. It was just that I often acted on impulses that may or may not have been in direct contridiction to explicit instructions my parents had given me on numerous occasions. That's all.

As I alluded before, "Do not, do not, do not play with the matches!" was one of those explicit instructions. It was often given at a volume that one might liken to a scream, and may have been accompanied by healthy corporal reinforcement. My mom could do this while at the same time stamping, snuffing, drenching or otherwise extenguishing any blaze(s) I had set that might still be alight. She's quite a woman.

A large part of the time one spends raising children, I think, is spent cleaning them, dressing them, and attempting to keep them dressed and clean. My mother hand her hands full with me and my siblings. Well, more me really. She developed a system. Hours before it was time to actually leave for some event/location I would be called in from playing outside and scrubbed thoroughly. My hair was combed, my body was clothed, and I was instructed in terms none too foggy that I was to sit still and not alter my appearance in any way lest I come to bodily harm. Only once this process was complete did she approach the task of preparing herself and the rest of the family. Sometimes I was a good little boy and sat quietly in my room and played with my toys, waiting for when it was time to go. Sometimes I would get a little bit... distracted, if you will.

On one particular winter evening, when I was in about 1st grade, my mother was preparing the family for an annual Christmas get together we always shared with two other families in the area whom we were particuarly close to. On these occasions it was of utmost importance that all us children looked our best. We were dolled into our Christmas Cutest and shown off for a few minutes when we arrived.

I was dressed and then sent to go play quietly and cleanly while everybody else got ready. After a reasonable amount of time doing this, my mind began to wander. As I was browsing my toys for something to new occupy myself with, my mind went to the Star Wars figurines I'd left outside earlier in the day. It occurred to me how terrible it would be to leave them out in the cold, possibly rainy elements. After all, hadn't Mom always told me to take care of my toys? Hadn't she made it a point that I shouldn't leave them outside and let them be ruined? And wouldn't she actually be upset with me if these toys were to spend the evening exposed to the elements? Well, like the good and dutiful son that I am, I struck out to rescue them.

Luke, Han, Chewie, another Luke in X-Wing gear, Greedo and a few other figures were outside in the sand pile. You might be envisioning a sand box at this point, so just let me take a moment to correct you. The sand pile was a pile of sand. It sat in our yard next to the new house that we were in the process of building next to our old house. It was that red dirt that (you may or may not know) is used to mix concrete with. A dumptruck had dumped a huge pile of it in our yard and it was immediately taken over by my brother and sister and I as a wonderously wonderful playplace. We dug an intricate interconnecting series of tunnels all through the pile that we used as a battleground for various actions figures in wars that could last days at a time. The rain had washed some of it out at one end forming a sort of plain situated at the base of a large orange mountain (large, that is, if you were the size of an action figure, which luckily my action figures were). If you've seen Star Wars, it really made a wonderful Tatooine. If you haven't, imagine the dry orang-ish landscape of, say, Tunisia. A desert. But with canyons and tunnels and oohs and ahhs.

Upon reaching my miniscule party of standed heroes, it occurred to me that there was really no difference in playing with them here and in my room. I mean, I would still be sitting quietly playing with my toys, just like I was asked, right? I wouldn't be getting sweaty or dirty. I'd just be sitting and playing. The only difference was, I'd be out here instead of in there. No big deal. Just to be sure, I even went and got a big peice of cardboard to kneel on while I played. It was foolproof.

When I played by myself, I often didn't actually move the figures around. Instead I liked to arrange them into little scenes, like a freeze frame of some action in progress. Since the sun was beginning to set, I arranged the figures in a seated circle at the base of the "mountain." This is where they were setting up camp for the night, you see. I soon had them all arranged like they were sitting and talking and settling in the the night. It made me feel all cozy.

But, I thought, it's so cold! What kind of idiots would camp for the night in weather like this without some source of warmth? Then it dawned on me... you guessed it - campfire!

I quickly darted about the yard picking up tiny sticks and splinters of wood to serve as tiny fire logs and bits of paper and pine straw to serve as their kindlin'. Now I just needed some matches.No problem. I snuck in the house and grabbed a coathanger from my closet. While everyone else was busy getting dressed in the back of the house (we only had one bathroom), I went to the kitchen and drug a chair from the the table over to the cabinets beside the refridgerator. I stood in the chair and used the corner of the hanger to grab the knob of the uppermost cabinet door above the fridge and swing it open. Then, on my tip-toes, I rattled it around in the cabinet until I heard the distinctive clatter of wood matches in a carboard box. I carefully drug the matches out over the lip of the shelf and into my waiting hand. Then I used the hanger to close the door back, replaced the chair, threw the hanger back in my room and I was on my way. Easy as that. Did my parents think I was stupid?

I ran back outside, practically vibrating with excitement. When I got back to the tiny campsite I carefully arranged the tiny little logs into a tiny little pile and, with the tenderest of care, I place Han, Luke and company into a snug little circle to bask in the warmth that was soon to come.
I struck a match and put it to the little pile, and it lit up sooo nicely. Once I had created my little scenes, I liked to get down there with them, so close that I could imagine I was there. I crouched down so close that my nose was amongst them. It was beautiful. The sun had dropped below the horizon, and the sky was a perfect twilight blue. The light of my little fire licked the canyon walls behind them and lapped across their figures, casting delightful dancing shadows in every direction at once. Beyond their little circle of light was the unknown in the darkness, but I just knew they felt safe right there. Imagination is a powerful thing at that age, and this intimate little outdoor diorama seemed so real to me that I was at once filled with a sort of giddy happiness for what I had created and a peculiar sadness because I wanted so badly to be there with them. I still distinctly remember what a powerful, magical feeling that was.

It was so powerful and magical in fact, that I almost didn't notice when a strange sensation crept across my forehead. I sat up, a little confused. I felt something like a very light breeze, soft and warm, emanating from my hairline. I suppose my brain registered this as odd because there was no soft, warm breeze hitting the rest of my body. It was almost like someone was holding a candle near my skin, and I could feel...the..."MYHEAD'SONFIREMYHEAD'SONFIRE!!!" I thought calmly to myself.

Let me tell you, nothing breaks the power and magic of a halcyon childhood moment like a your head catching on fire. It really just breaks the mood. Luckily for me (and all the LAYdees out there) I did not sustain any disfiguring injury. Fortunately, the fire safety slogan "Stop, Drop and Roll" had been drilled into my head for weeks at school. Stop was easy, but how does one "drop and roll" one's head? I acted quickly and decisively: I dove head-first into the sand-pile and ground my hair all around until I felt sure the hair fire was snuffed. In the process I brought half the dirt pile mountain down on Luke and company, snuffing them and their quaint little campfire as well.

I sat up again and paused. No more suspicous heat emanating from my forehead. So far so good. Time for damage assessment. I gave a few cautious taps around up there to check for tell-tale gooiness... all clear! I seemed to have escaped unscathed, as it were. How lucky I was. I decided it might be time to mosey on inside and sit quietly.

As soon as I walked in the door, Mom called from down the hall in the bathroom. "David, come here. You better not have been outside getting dirty!" "No Ma'am," I said as I walked into the bathroom. "I just went to get some toys I left out in the sand pile." Mom was at the mirror, carefully applying mascara. She didn't look up, but she said "Didn't I tell you to go play in your room and-- ... do you smell something burning?" "No ma'am!" I said quickly, shaking my head furiously. As I did, I shook loose some sand still lingering in my hair. It fell to the linoleum floor with a ssssshhhhh that did not go unnoticed by either of us. I stared at the sand covered floor helplessly and when I looked up, she was looming over me with a look of horror on her face. "OHMYLORDWHATONEARTHHAPPENEDTOYOURHAIR?!"

At this point I could see that the situation had the potential to escalate out of hand if I didn't explain things quickly. I stepped back as she lunged toward me to investigate and held up a hand. "Don't worry mom," I said calmly. "I was outside making a campfire for my Star Wars men and I accidently caught my hair on fire, but I knew exactly what to do. I smashed my head in the sand pile and put it right out. It didn't even burn me!" I was actually sort of proud of myself for being so resourful.

For some reason, this didn't have the relieving effect on her I had expected. In fact, it seemed only to upset her more. "YOU DID WHAT?!?!?" she screamed. "YOUR HEAD??? ARE YOU OKAY? HOW ON EARTH DID YOU-- ARE YOU OKAY?!?!" she snatched me up and pulled my head close to her and examined the little scorched spot at my hairline. "OH MY LORD YOU BURNED YOUR HEAD! ELDON GET IN HERE!! DAVID CAUGHT HIS HEAD ON FIRE!!" My dad ran in from his bedroom and snatched me up to look. "WHAT? WHERE?!" I think he expected my head to actually still be in flames. Mom pointed to to my little burned patch of hair and Dad looked closely. For several minutes they looked me over thoroughly and talked in panicked tones to each other while they tried to asssess the damage.

Soon enough they gathered that I was rather unharmed, despite it all. The only damage that had been done was that where my sweet little blonde-boy hair had once been about three inches long in a sweet little blonde-boy bowl cut, there was now a very conspicuous area of charred, smelly, gnarled, short ex-hair.

We will now skip my least favorite part of the story. I'm sure of all of you can probably recall a time from your youth where all the energy your parents could suddenly gain from fear for your safety could just as suddenly, upon being assured of your well being, be channeled into an equal amount of rage. You can probably further imagine how well the next thirty minutes or so went for me. If I had simpy messed up my nicely combed hair, I probably would have been in trouble.
I had not only messed it up, but I had caught it on fire and ground it in the dirt. Moving on.

My parents' only recourse was to strip me down and wash me up all over gain, then take our electric clippers and buzz my whole head to the length of the little cooked spot. Then I had to shower again to get all the itchy loose hair off of me, then re-dressed in clothes not covered in sand. Needless to say, we were a bit late for the Christmas party.

The car ride there was no fun for me. When we arrived, everyone was curious about my new haircut, and Mom and Dad were more than happy to explain the reasons behind it. The story was quite a hit. The mothers were horrified. The fathers were amused. The other kids were amazed. I was more confused than anything.

I just didn't see what the big deal was. Like I said, I didn't even get burned. Sometimes parents just don't make any sense at all.

The 12 Year Old War

I was twelve years old. I was drinking from a can of coke. "Cocola," as we called it. Still fresh from the cooler and ice cold, it dripped with the humidity of the summer air. The metal taste of the can and the biting cold of the drink made me wince happily as it brought the long awaited moisture to the dusty back of my throat.

I looked at my best friend, sitting there with me, hunched in the heat that was lessened not quite enought by the shade of the pines. The pine bed we sat in was shaded, but it lacked the cooling moist earth of the woods cut by the creek nearer my house. Heat met us fiercely from the angry dry needles at our feet, scattered like so many pick-up stix over the edge of the field where the plowed dirt had hardened into clumps less lethal than rocks. These had been our means of war all morning.

Now the heat of mid-day had driven us to peace and Mr. Larry's corner store for cokes. From there we retired to that which was our own shady Geneva. We sipped our drinks in a temporary peace we both secretly planned to break. We casually eyed the dirt at our feet for choice ballistics. We knew our war would resume when the aluminum was empty.

Sweat was still beading my forehead and sticking my shirt to my skin. James spit on the ground in front of him while he rested the elbow of his drinking arm on his right knee. He held his can loosely in fingers that were thick and strong for a boy his age. His other hand was palm down on the stump he sat on and his head hung with fatigue. His saliva slowly stretched from his pursed lips, finally breaking and dropping.

Neither of us spoke. We were both too tired and it wasn't necessary anyway. I just sat there, inhaling the humidity. I could taste the warm, thick air passing though my open mouth and over my tongue. It dried my throat, heated my lungs, and left in deference to the next tired breath. James let out the tiniest of grunts as he leaned forward and picked up a stick from the dirt with his free hand. Still silent, I watched him use it to idly mix his saliva in the dirt, making a paste, like Jesus preparing to heal the blind.

I pulled at the tall clump of grass beside me and found a blade that was long and thick enough to pull taught between the thumb and heel of each hand. Every kid out in the country learns at a young age to use a blade of grass like this to make a whistle. James looked up from his paste as I struggled to coax a note from the blade and produced only an airy whine, a flat note that died unmusically at the end of each breath that I pushed through my fingers.

Sorry. I'm out of time, but I'm posting this much now in the interest of having something new up here. What do you think so far?

"Sampson"

When I took off my hat, she laughed at me.

I knew she was looking at my hair, and that it probably was funny-looking right then. I took a look at my reflection in the rear-view mirror. I'd had my hat on since early that morning. I'd jumped out of the shower, gotten dressed and thrown on the hat in lieu of any semblance of hair-maintenance. Thing is, whenever I do this, my hair has the habit of behaving something like a frozen liquid, taking the shape of its container and then holding that form until some effort is made to thaw it. In this particular instance, mi capellii had frozen in a tragic tangle of swirls flowing back from my forehead and matted to my scalp. This was accented by the visible line that marked the point where the area covered by the hat ended and the area that had enjoyed an open-air drying began, with the bottom noticeably more fluffy than the top. The cherry on top was the pinkish-red line running the breadth of my forehead and hinting at the possiblility of a lobotomy in the recent past. I cracked a smile myself. I was funny looking.

I scratched my head a little bit to loosen the tangles. "Thanks," I said sarcastically. Gina tousled my hair a bit more for me and then started scratching my head up and down and around in little circles, which she knew I love, as most guys do. When she stopped too soon I whined a little bit and, when she didn't resume scratching, I put my cap back on and gave her my best pouty-face as I drove on.

"Awww, you're just like a little whiney puppy," she said "maybe I'll call you Sampson, too."

I looked at the little bobble-head dog on her dash that I'd bought her the week before and it nodded back in acknowledgement. "Nah," I said "it fits him better, I think."

"But oo's a widdle puppy poo too, isn't oo?" she gushed in the voice she knew I hated.

"Stop it"

"Es him is! 'E's a widdle biddy puppy pooo!" she scratched behind my ears playfully.

"Please stop it."

"Awwwwwwwwwwww does da widdle biddy puppy poo not like it when Gina-weena talks wike dis?"

"Seriously! Stop it."

"Mmmmmmkay..." and after a long pause, "...puppy poo." She settled back in her seat, looking infinitely pleased with herself, smiling ahead at the road. God, she was beautiful just then.

I smiled too, in spite of myself. I hate to admit it but I actually sort of liked it when she talked in that horrible little baby voice. I knew she only did it to get under my skin, which I can appreciate. It's good to see a girl give as good as she gets every once in a while... Yeah, but I also just liked her babying me. I'll be a man and admit it. Dammit, I was smitten.

I looked at her sitting there with her smug little smile and I felt blood rush to my face. It made me feel warm to look at her and I loved it. We'd only been dating for a little while, and it was scary how much I was into her. She made me think these awful, gushy thoughts that I never thought would find themselves in my mind. After all, I thought I was sane. But now I knew something that connected me to the rest the men in history: This is what men fight for. This is why men write and sing. This was why men spend, travel and just plain lose their minds... to make something like this all their own. I thought things like this, and I knew they were inexcuseably lame. I knew they were worse than the worst bad poetry I just and didn't care. I was in the kind of love that made everyone around me want to puke, and I was all the better for it. And to think that she felt the same way about me just made no sense. We were in our own little world and nobody could touch us.

It was ridiculous. It was gross. I was falling hard.

I don't know what we hit in the road, if we hit anything, but just then my front left tire blew. It just blew. We were on the interstate going seventy-five miles and hour and this thing doesn't just go flat, it pops. "POW!" and I can't steer for anthing. I felt the left side of the car drop a few inches up front and heard the whump whump whump of the tire before it completely shredded and came off. I was in the left lane and we were between two of those concrete barriers in a construction zone. Everything started moving in slow motion. Gina was screaming beside me. When the tire came off the rim dug into the newly paved asphalt below us and jerked the car violently to the left. The front end slammed into the concrete barricade and the back end spun out behind me so I was staring straight at the barrier now in front of me. I looked to my left and saw a white minivan barreling towards us. I felt my side of the car start to lift and I just knew we were going to flip, but before we did the minivan swerved to its right and took the back off our car. The impact whipped my head into the window and busted it out. I could hear the glass breaking but I didn't feel the smack. When the minivan slammed into us it spun us 180 degrees in the road and we came to a stop perpindicular to oncoming traffic. I felt warm wetness on the side of my head and face. I couldn't see well at first. Everything sounded muffled and Gina was shaking me and saying something I couldn't hear or couldn't understand. She had tears in her eyes. Everything was still happening so slowly. I looked to my left and saw the minivan and the back of our car crumpled together ahead in the road. I figure maybe five seconds had passed since the tire blew.

Dull in my ears, I heard the sound of screeching tires again. I looked back to my right and behind Gina's tear streaked face I saw the chrome grill of a big black truck coming too fast. My eyes widened and I tried to yell but nothing came out. Gina had just started to turn her head to follow my gaze when I saw the glass behind her explode. Even over the screaming tires I could hear the pieces singing through the air around us. The headlights of the truck lit them from behind and gave her a halo made of a million tiny stars. I couldn't help but think that she looked beautiful.


...


Now I hold her hand, and she sleeps softly beside me. Monitors beep and machines hiss around us under the flourescent hospital lights. She is still beautiful and I wish that I could give her a kiss and wake her up like in the fairy tales. But I've already tried a hundred times.

It's been almost three weeks since I woke up in a bed like the one she lays in now and my mother cried over me. They told me I'd been asleep for nine days.

Gina got the worst of it. The truck hit her side. But she is alive and stable and they tell me that's a miracle in itself. They say she could wake up tomorrow or not at all.

I can't be here all the time. I've got class and other stuff, but I am here otherwise. The sun has been up for about three hours now and I've got to leave soon for my 9:00. But when I go, in case she wakes up while I'm gone, I want her to know I've been here and that I will be back real soon.

I reach in my book bag and pull out Sampson. I put him on the table at the foot of her bed. As I walk out, I give him a little tap on the nose and I hope he'll still be nodding when she wakes.

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