Something Charles Darwin might well have said: For some species, babies may require months to learn survival skills from parents. For humans, very much longer.

I have to admit, as a teenager I might have tried something like this if internet phone videos were common.

 

 

 

5 hours ago, Fielder said:

I have to admit, as a teenager I might have tried something like this if internet phone videos were common.

Confession time: About fifty-three years ago, I stupidly used a lighter and can of something (I don't remember what) and managed to set some curtains ablaze in the basement of our apartment in Tehran, Iran. When a good friend of my parents and my mother ran down to the basement to see what was going on, my mom asked me what I had done, to which I shakily replied, "I don't know. The curtains just caught fire."

Needless to say, mom wasn't buying that load of malarky! 😮

LOL, Hey, Mom, pay no attention to the fire on the curtains!

 

It may have been a stupid thing to do, but I feel for him. It must be horrible to have extensive burns all over your body.

What's next?  The hairspray canon?

I've been extraordinarily lucky all my life.  I've had some close calls but always came out smelling like a rose.  Even the two years I spent as an EOD technician.  Buy I've seen some who weren't s lucky.

This is one of my boyhood stories.  I guess it could have gone badly, but like I said, I've been a pretty lucky fellow.

The Mystery Explosion on Larkin Street

It was February, and Chinese New Year was just around the corner.

Chinese New Year was a big event for the neighborhood kids.  Fireworks were against the law in San Francisco, but the city looked the other way in Chinatown during that annual celebration.  Those Chinese merchants became a once a year source of forbidden toys.

Lee and I  hiked up Pacific Street, over Russian Hill and down to Chinatown.  For almost a week we had been hearing the sporadic echoes of firecrackers around the neighborhood.  Our pockets were full of allowance money, and the siren lure of those little packets of gunpowder called.

We worked the grocery stores along Grant Avenue and the side streets of San Francisco's Oriental community.  We knew that hidden in the backs of those shops filled with hanging carcasses of dried fish and seaweed, exotic fruits and vegetables, packages of noodles with strange writing on them, and pungent odors from the Orient, was the treasured contraband we were looking for.

It was tough to find a merchant who would sell firecrackers to a couple of runt towheads, but every year we managed to whine a package or two or three.  This year was different!  We hit the jackpot!  We spent our entire allowance on ten packages of firecrackers.

Every day after school  we would take a pack of firecrackers from  the hidden stash in our closet, fill our pockets with kitchen matches from the box on top of the stove, and  go the empty lot at the end of Larkin Street.

Carefully we unraveled the woven fuses and separated each little bomb.  We would  place them in mounds of dirt, under tin cans, or tie them to the stems of small weeds.  Then, imagining ourselves Marines on the beaches of Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima, proceed blow the daylights out of these hapless mounds of dirt, tin cans, and small weeds.

When Chinese New Year was over, we had three packages of fire crackers and a couple of sparklers left.  We also had a large bamboo clothes pole in our closet.  Next year was eons away, and Lee and I were firm believers in 'instant gratification' long before it had become a popular term in our society.

Mom was out shopping the afternoon we decided to use up the rest of our firecrackers.  I took down the bamboo clothes pole and sawed off one end.  The hollow reed made a perfect tube, naturally sealed at the end.

Lee and I took the three remaining packages of firecrackers, and with razor blades, sliced open each little bomb.  We carefully unrolled the paper and collected the gunpowder into a small pile on a piece of paper in the middle of the kitchen table.  

That little pile grew to a substantial amount.  Within 30 minutes we had collected all of the powder contained in the three packages of firecrackers.  Carefully I poured it all  into the bamboo tube.

 Then I inserted a sparkler for the fuse and with the end of a pencil proceeded to tamp the powder down good and tight.  Finally, I told Lee to get some toilet paper.  I wadded it up, moistened it a little, and tamped it down to hold the powder.  I explained to Lee that this was the way they did it in the Civil War, or at least that was the way I remember reading about it.

Shortly before four o'clock that afternoon, Lee and I planted the home made firecracker smack in the middle of Larkin Street.  I lit the sparkler and we retreated to the doorway of our house.  We waited.

 After an eternity had passed I thought the sparkler had gone out or that our firecracker was a dud.  Then I felt the heat on my legs.  Simultaneously the report echoed through the neighborhood.  Windows rattled and I felt real fear for the first time in my life.  I looked into Lee's eyes and saw a reflection of the same terror that must have been in mine.

Out in the street an enormous cloud of white smoke  rose  into the sky raining  bamboo splinters onto the pavement.  

Apartment windows slammed opened up and down the street and the women of our predominantly Italian neighborhood started shouting at each  in their native tongue.  

Lee and I melted back into the stoop, slid through the open door, and retreated to our bedroom to await our punishment.

Perhaps no one saw us.  Perhaps no one thought the two towheaded runts were capable of doing whatever had been done.  Mom and Dad never found out what had happened.  It was one of those rare moments in life when you escape accountability for your actions.  

For all I know, the Mystery Explosion of Larkin Street is still a mystery.

Noel