Update: The fires are still raging down here, but here’s my delayed fire post. I do not intend to make light of what’s happening with the wildfires in my part of the state. I think what you can glean from this post is: don’t play with fire, godammit.

Cloudy’s awesome post about being a youthful pyro prompted me to share these true stories about the other side of the same coin.

Any budding pyromania I may have been developing was doused, har, by three fire-related accidents in my youth that were so traumatizing to me that I became a total pyrophobe.

Fire accident 1. I went on a camping trip with my parents when I was about eight. In the evening, around the fire, while my parents dozed in their chairs, I amused myself by putting a stick in the fire, igniting it, then shaking the stick to put it out. One time, I shook the stick so hard the embers flew everywhere — including onto the forehead of my dozing mom. I don’t remember her being hurt, or either of them getting terribly mad at me, but my stomach still roils with guilt at the memory.

Fire accident 2. At age eleven, in the kitchen in Phoenix, I amused myself by holding one of those joke relighting birthday cake candles by blowing it out then watching it reignite. (I am sensing a pattern here.) I thought I had put it out for good by shaking it really well. I then deposited the candle in the kitchen trash. Minutes later I walked by to see the large plastic kitchen garbage can totally ablaze. I screamed for my mother, who picked up the can, and (while melting, trailing pieces of plastic dripped on her legs and feet) threw the whole mess in the swimming pool. Again, I don’t remember the fallout from the experience — I do admire mom’s bravery in the days before household alarms and extinguishers

Fire accident 3. One winter in New York, when I was 14 and alone in the house, I started a fire in the fireplace, without noticing the ash grate in the bottom of the hearth was missing. The embers, therefore, fell down the chute to the basement. The ash repository’s metal door in the basement happened to be open, so the embers tumbled out onto a mattress that was lying nearby. All of this was deduced later — at the time, all I knew was that I smelled something funny, and when I opened the door to the basement, smoke came bursting out. I called the fire department; the firemen dragged the mattress to the back yard and chopped it up with an ax. When they opened the windows to set up smoke-clearing fans, the cats ran off (one of them was missing for a week), but I managed to grab the dog at the last second, who howled and clawed in my arms. This is about the time that my dad and stepmom came home.