There's a picture of me playing with fire when I was a year old. I know because it was taken at my first birthday party - the single candle told me so. In it I'm in a high chair, wide eyed and fascinated with a single pointing pink digit straining to touch the flame lit to celebrate successful completion of my first year of life. I say straining because the picture also shows a piece of my father holding me from being burned by a taut handful of my overalls. Whenever it's shown to my immediate family the inevitable "I told you so" looks and "We should have knowns" get passed around like joints at a Hip concert- freely and without consideration of offending. Or so I'm told after the fact. I'm always too captured by the glimpse back at true and perfect open wonder to notice.
So, I can be completely confident in my assertion that I have always been fascinated by fire. I can remember the first book of matches I found under the slide in the park behind the house before my sister was born and being caught with burned fingertips. Then there was a Sunday School class about Samson tying several pairs of foxes to a torch each and sending them pell mell through Philistine cornfields - I had a taste of what heaven's savour is rumored to be like that morning. (In fact, your Bible's chock full of bonerific burning imagery and it's a wonder that there aren't more devout Christian firebugs.) No sooner were we home from Church that day then I was out the back gate with a pilfered bic to spend the afternoon raining brimstone on sinning ants. Again, I was betrayed by burnt fingers and the blue plastic lighter was confiscated. Keeping fire away from me only fuelled my desire for more and I learned from my mistakes.
Lighting fires became a secret thing to be shared only with close confidences who would be in as much trouble as me if caught - mostly my brother. It was his idea to keep the fires small and us out of trouble and I complied in his presence. But I would argue that only containment was key to not being discovered and one day he relented. We filled a garbage can full of birch bark, set a match to it and didn't account for the wind. The rest of that day stays locked away in a sealed juvenile record. Two years later we were both in cubscouts where the same man who held me back from my first birthday candle and tanned my ass after court initiated me into the Art of the One-Match Fire. Soon I was performing in front of crowds and providing a service at the same time - like masturbating for a sterile posterity or nose picking to feed the homeless.
See, I've got a fire to look forward to. It's been raining for the past two days which means that there can be one out at the cottage this weekend. I can lay it, light it, feed it and kill it at my leisure - for my pleasure. I'll play the dutiful scout and be safe about it but the wide eyed, apple cheeked one-year old in me is always reaching for more. Only now there's no one to hold me back by my overalls and I'll be drinking enough to maybe let myself loose as well. Maybe I'll smoke a joint too many and imagine that fires get the munchies too. Let's just hope that I don't feed it the world.
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