“What happens when CHILD sets a FIRE”

Oct 8th “What happens when CHILD sets a FIRE”

Match + Pencil Box = “FIRE”

When you are a “FIRST-GRADER” there will always come a day, when you grow up in a hurry!

For a little “KID” I generally was the happiest of kids!

Being the first, in our family… I usually knew what was going on and what was about to happen, as it always helped me to keep my ears – on the “listening mode?”

I do believe… that I had heard someone say, “Are you paying any attention at all… to what I am saying?”

That phrase is as boring as it sounds … and makes no real sense for me, to hear, once it has been said?

So NOW… I always have myself listening to everything … good and or bad, and at all times… always ready with an answer… for that which I hear while in the ” listening mode!”

What an explosion, when I opened the door, coming home from school, and I was in such a good mood?

One million questions bang, bang, bang … and what did you, and where did those matches come from?

If ever a good “KID” needed a terrific lawyer, it sure was then!

I’m hardly in side the house… cannot figure what is going on or what happened, but I do see “SNEAKY TOMMY” – on that old wooden red stool, trying to look all innocent… and… as if, I had done something terrible?

I am ushered into the room where our “SNEAKY TOMMY” had taken the matches out of my pencil box and started lighting them.

And since they were such short and little matches, I guess he could not hold on to them, dropping them instead, and near the window where the curtains caught on “FIRE!”

I heard for … at least a hundred or more times… of all the damage that could have been done, as well as they also… could have died!

“LUCKY” for us… that my father has “eagle ears and nose” to see and hear what “SNEAKY KIDS” might do, and he would be able to immediately “POUNCE DOWN” on that emergent situation!

Did I say… I was “LUCKY” too, – if there had been any real damage done to the room or house, if no adults were in the house, and as dumb as “TOMMY” was to just go and sit in another room, waiting for a fire to come out where he was and burn him and the whole house down?

How dumb can a kid get and or be?

But, like I said, no damage – I escaped any and all punishment, since “Tommy” stole the matches and did something he should not have done.

In some of the pictures that I have posted you can see that room where the fire took place and you can view others that I have and you will see no “FIRE” damage to the room and no damage to the furniture.

The dresser with the marble insert was right where you see it in the picture in the 1940’s and then in the 1950’s was sold to an antique dealer for top dollar.

“NO DAMAGE” and no fire department, no police, and no orphanage for the children, as there were no reasons to be sent there by a “social” worker!

As the many years and time have gone by… I have heard what our little Tommy has to say about this episode in his life… he forgets… that I know exactly what he said… and as I am the older person in the family…

I do remember some other things that he had done… but, he has a way of exaggerating… so much so… just to get attention… and his tale today is…

…. is that the Police had so many cars sent to our house and then the fire department with all of their equipment there to put out a major fire… and because… we kids deserved to be punished… were then sent to an orphanage!