Playing with Fire

So, Denny’s antics with fire started long, long ago I’ve been told.  There is some story of a fire in the tree house when they lived in Northridge.  Denny always hated when anyone told that story, unless it was him.  I will leave the details of that episode to Keith or Karen, I’m fuzzy on the details – think he tried to blame it on a crystal radio…

 

Always on the edge of danger, the first memorable encounter I had with his pyro tendencies was when we lived in the house on Alexo in Lancaster.  It happened sometime between when Wendy was born and when I was pregnant with Craig, since my maternity clothes stored in the rafters of the garage were a casualty of the following incident. 

 

When Denny changed the oil, washed or cleaned parts, etc, he stored the old used gas and oil and any other petroleum products in empty gallon antifreeze jugs.  One day he had a very full one on the workbench and decided to find out what would happen if he put a match to it.  (Yeah, I know, bright idea, huh?)  Well, it made a nice little flame at the top of the jug, kinda like a lantern…until…he accidently knocked it over!  Then as fire is wont to do, it followed the gas/oil trail everywhere it ran.  In the ensuing chaos, I am not sure how it got put out, but it managed to light up well enough to damage the boxes stored in the rafters.  That was a pretty good blaze, as you might imagine.  Luckily, it didn’t burn down the house, or anything too valuable!  The fire department was called at some point and the boxes had smoke and water damage.  Our house insurance paid something for the damaged stuff – my first encounter with replacement cost versus prorated value clauses in insurance policies.  Luckily the structure itself was mostly undamaged.  Denny’s pride wasn’t so lucky.

 

Of course, his love of fire didn’t end, it probably just became a bigger challenge!  The kids will all remember him making paper airplanes, dousing them with lighter fluid, setting them on fire and flying them off the back deck of the Beechwood house.  Somehow, that never ended in disaster!  (Well, unless you count the incident when the kids did it when we weren’t home…but that’s another story.)  Paradise being the tinder box of dry leaves and pine needles covering the most roofs, and a lot of the landscape, fire was a particularly exciting event. 

 

Another favorite fire trick was to get a blazing fire going in the fireplace in the living room (especially at Christmas with lots of wrapping paper that made a high fire).  I think it started with somehow going outside and seeing the bits of glowing paper floating out of the chimney that inspired him to take a full sheet of newspaper opened full out and lay it in the fireplace on top of the blaze to see what would happen.  Well, it was pretty cool, as all will attest, to run outside and watch the entire sheet, intact, float out of the chimney still on fire until it glowed and then went out and landed somewhere.  How it never landed on Harvey’s roof, which had an abundance of pine needles, or ours, or anywhere else that would light up in an instant, I’ll never know!  I do know that was about the final straw for one of our neighbors, who after one such experiment was pretty upset watching the flying fire from his house, and really reprimanded us for the dangerous behavior.  Rightly so, I suppose.  But it sure was fun!  Also, somehow, our chimney was old enough, or had been altered in some way and it didn’t have a spark arrestor, or anything to prevent the huge papers from exiting intact!  Design flaw – so really, it wasn’t Denny’s fault the paper flew out on fire! 

 

I am sure there are more fire stories – they don’t come to mind right now – anyone who remembers, just jump right in here.  I do know the love of fire was in some way passed down to Chris – if you haven’t experienced one of his outrageous bonfires yet, you’ve really missed something.  They would make his dad proud!

 

Story by Jeri Tovey – who lived through it to tell the tales.