Turn out the lights, the pyro's over

The first time I burned down our garage I was probably 8 or 9 years old. With any kind of luck it was before my baptism so I couldn't be held acountable for it but I really think I could have been 10 or 12. We had an old wooden garage that was about 50 feet or so from our house. The house had an attached garage that my dad had converted into a utility room and later enclosed part of it for my bedroom (another story entirely). The wooden garage also had a lean-to against the back of it that was left over from when we lived in a trailor and needed more room so Dad built an addition that "leaned" against the trailor. It now became additional storage space for all sorts of stuff like old mattresses pictures, cloth and whatever you would normally put in the attic if you had one. You need to know that my Mom never threw away ANYTHING, ever, in her whole life. This necessitated a plethora of space to hold the stuff she never threw away. The 4th of July was soon upon us and we were planning to go fishing at Mackey Dam so the folks had purchased some sparklers, bottle rockets, black snakes, and other "harmless" celebratory pyrotechnics for us little kiddies. I lacked the patience to wait for the 4th, or darkness for that matter, so I decided to take a sparkler and go into the realative darkness of the lean-to to watch it sparkle. It was quite anticlmactic what with it being 2 o'clock in the afternoon and not much darker than outside so I let it burn out and tossed it back behind the mattresses. How was I to know with my not-so-well-developed brain that that sucker was still just a few degrees cooler than the surface of the sun? A few hours later someone noticed flames out of the top of the garage and the excitement bagan! It was far too much for the garden hose and soon many neighbors were there dragging our jeep out before it caught fire but were pretty much unable to save anything else. I can still see my Dad hosing down the roof of our house to keep it from catching fire. It took about 30 minutes to get a fire truck there from the atomic energy site that was about 8 miles away and by that time there wasn't much but a smoldering pile of rubble. Burned up in the blaze was our boat & motor, all the camping gear and Dad's $3,000 lathe. $3,000 then was like $4 billion now. The fire was blamed on faulty electrical wiring so I let it. I didn't tell my Mom that it was my fault until one time when she was visiting us in Texas and I was in my 30s and to big to as well as too poor to sue. With the insurance money my Dad built a bigger cinder-block garage with a concrete floor and a nice pit in the middle of it so we could work on the underside of cars. It had electricity but no heat so He built (I swear, the man was McKyver) a stove out of a 50-gallon barrel. It laid on its side on legs he'd welded to it and had a stove pipe that went up through the roof. He cut a door in one end so we could burn wood in it to keep us nice and toasty warm in the winter. Idaho only has two seasons, winter and August so we got a lot of use out of that stove. It also came in handy when I tried to burn this garage down too. More tomorrow...

P.S. There have been questions about who is "s" in my last blog. It was supposed to be "girls" but only the s came out. Babs told me it's because of the cybersitter not allowing the word "girl" so we'll see if any of those words describing a young human female come out in this paragraph. , , s...so there! She was right! That previous sentence was "Girl", "girl", "girl"s...so there! Holy crap! I guess I'm stuck with using quotation marks anytime I want to use that word.