Fast forward about 23 years, and I am a recently divorced mother of two pre-school-aged children.
We live on an upper floor in a high-rise apartment building. It’s Saturday afternoon, and I am slow-cooking chicken and dumplings. The pot is on the stove’s back burner, and the burner is set on low.
I need to make a quick trip to the bathroom. But, before I go, I look through the doorless doorway between the kitchen and living room to see what my children are doing. They are sitting on the carpeted floor near the sofa. My daughter is playing house with her dolls, toy kitchen, and tea set. My son is busy coloring outside the lines in his picture book.
I steal away to the bathroom. It is about 20 feet straight down the hallway, past our two bedrooms directly opposite the kitchen. When the bathroom door is open, the mirror on the medicine cabinet above the sink provides a clear rear view of the kitchen.
Having been a mischievous child, I knew that even the most well-behaved children could get into anything in a split second. So, out of habit, whenever my children are not sleeping, I always open the bathroom door while washing my hands. I was soaping up when the scent of something burning caused me to look up in the mirror. And I froze. Flames were shooting from the wastebasket set against the kitchen wall about three feet from the stove. (This was a few years before city regulations mandated smoke alarms in apartment buildings.)
I dropped the soap in the sink and sprinted like Flo-Jo down the hallway to the kitchen. My son was standing trancelike inches away from the waste basket and staring at the flames. I hastily opened the door to the lower cabinet opposite the wastebasket. For a split second, my mind flashed back to the cremation of Raggedy Ann. I reached into the cabinet, grabbed a large pot, set it in the sink beneath the faucet, and filled it with water. As I poured the water into the wastebasket dousing the flames, I was thankful that there were only a few tin cans and scraps of paper in the trashcan before it was set afire.
After I was confident that the fire was out, I took my son’s hands, looked him over from head-to-toe and front-to-back, and was relieved that I didn’t see any burns on his skin or clothing. Then, I transformed into angry parent mode.
It took a few minutes of questioning and the “crazy mom” look before he admitted to doing what I suspected. After sticking a piece of paper in the flame beneath the pot, he panicked and threw the lit paper in the wastebasket. I kept silently thanking God that he didn’t toss the burning paper through the doorway and onto the carpet in the living room.
One would think that his punishment – sitting for a considerable time in his little yellow plastic kid’s chair would teach him a lesson. It didn’t.
About two years later, we were living in a different apartment building. My son and his sister were playing outside. As I called for them to come inside, the phone rang, so I told them to play in their bedroom until I got off what turned out to be a lengthy phone call with my best friend.
At some point, after they closed the door to their room, I smelled smoke. I was sitting on the bed, still talking on the phone, and I told my girlfriend I’d call her back.
I hurried to the kids’ room and flung open the door. The room was filled with smoke, but I didn’t see flames and couldn’t tell where the smoke was coming from. I dashed around the room, hurriedly looking inside the closet, in the dresser drawers, behind the curtains, and all around the room, the whole while yelling, “Where is the fire? Tell me where the fire is, now?”
In hindsight, I should have rushed the kids out of the apartment, but I didn’t see flames and wanted to find and extinguish the fire quickly. In the time it would have taken me to usher them outdoors and run back inside to locate the fire, it would have spread.
“The real trick in life is to turn hindsight into foresight that reveals insight.” Robin Sharma
“Dennis and Denise the Menace” stood there wearing the guilty face children display when they know they are in trouble. Finally, my son, the perpetrator of the crime, pointed to the mattress on one of their twin beds. I reached down and flipped the mattress up on its side. A small flame was slowly beginning to spread between the wooded frame of what looked like straw filler inside the bottom of the bed. Never in my life had I felt so afraid. I ran to the bathroom, grabbed a mop bucket, and half-filled it with water from the tub. I left the water running as I ran back and forth, pitching water on the burning area until it was drenched. Then, afraid that the fire might still be smoldering inside the mattress, I lowered the mattress and poured water on the topside, soaking it.
After some prodding, my son told me that he had found a cigarette lighter outside while they were playing. Since I was on the phone, he had crawled under his bed to play with it. Then, in a quivering voice, he told me (parodying a then popular TV commercial), “I just wanted to flick my Bic.”
“Where is the lighter?” I asked through clenched teeth. He stuck his hand in his pant pocket, pulled it back out, unfolded his fingers, and held the lighter toward me. I snatched it from his hand and said, “Don’t you know that you could have burned this place down? I’m gonna flick your Bic.”
That was the last fire-starter incident in our home, and I hope that the childhood pyromania gene in our lineage fizzled out.
One of the cutest Flick Your Bic commercials.
