To say that my dad was quirky would be an understatement. He was also a pyromaniac. To his credit and to my knowledge, he never burnt down any sheds, barns or public buildings.
My dad had the habit of collecting the family dry and flammable garbage in the basement. He stacked boxes full of our waste paper and cardboard, (all very flammable), along one entire wall. We all knew that if the house ever caught fire we were sitting on a tinder box and we were all doomed.
I think my dad, without knowing it, was ahead of his times. He was the forerunner of sorting garbage for recycling; only no one had heard of that concept yet, and we never actually recycled a thing. When we had a cereal box, newspapers wrappings, cardboard box, grocery bag (they were made from course brown paper) we were trained to simply throw them down the basement steps for later stacking against the wall.
The “wall” also became a great place for target practice with my BB gun until “someone put an eye out.” I attached targets to some of the paper filled boxes along the wall and use them for my marksmanship practice.
That practice turned out to be short lived when to my dismay I soon discovered that at such a short range BB’s have the ability to travel through the target, the box, all the paper in the box, hit the cement wall on the other side, then ricochet madly back in the shooters general direction. Now I would remember if I, or anyone else actually put out an eye, but I did get a BB between the eyes. I took that as an omen and used the gun outside on small woodland creatures.
The point of the exercise after all was not to shoot at the boxes, but to burn them. As a family unit we had to accumulate a critical mass of fibrous product for a pyrotechnical display at the end of the month, even better, sometimes at the end of several months. This had become a popular ritual for the kids in our neighbourhood and I was frequently asked by my friends, “Is it time yet?”
At the end of the month the Rempel kids their co-conspirators and random enablers eagerly joined together to make a giant pyre at the end of the driveway. I’m certain that any passing Hindu would take serious pause and deep reflection as to our intentions. We weren’t multicultural back then and wouldn’t have cared anyway. We wanted to burn stuff!
I think my dad was of the opinion and lived by the motto,” if you burn it, they will come” because we always had a crowd of exuberant kids and disgusted adults. These were the type of disgruntled adults who often appeared in early horror movies carrying pitch forks attempting to run the monster out of the village and ironically quite eager to burn down the castle in the process. It was a rough neighbourhood.
Our driveway and property, by the way, were not situated on some isolated country acreage. Our short drive led on to a very busy street and was on a bus route. None of this seemed to faze my father as we continued to heap the cardboard boxes immediately under the hydro lines that ran about 20 feet above the driveway.
Next to Christmas, as far as festive occasion goes, this was even better than Easter. It was more of a pagan ritual probably stemming from pre-Christian times. As kids we had also played a game in which we dressed up as “savages” from the equatorial rain forest, or more precisely we envisioned ourselves as some sort of Greco/Roman/Amazonian hybrid.
We made spears and shields from garbage can lids and took our sisters and other girls in the neighbourhood as hostages for sacrifice to the Gods of the orchards. We lived in the Niagara Fruit Belt and felt human sacrifice was a prerequisite to a good harvest. We were a more suburban version of the children of the corn. We always thought the fire ritual would be a perfect setting to sacrifice a young virgin, but to our collective disappointment my father was quite strict on this point.
However, I believe a few cats went missing during the burning, but I think this was just a vicious rumour started by some of the local missionaries. To my knowledge no animal or virgin, was ever harmed in the making or burning of our pyres.
For some unexplained reason, as a child, I never understood why my mother never joined in on the fire ritual. She chose to look out; quite nervously it seemed, from the living room window. With the reflection of the flames on the window my mom at times looked quite surreal. I could see her hands go to her face as the flames leaped and tickled the hydro wires above the driveway. I never really got the connection between those wires and the necessities of life, such as watching Saturday morning cartoons and Captain Kangaroo.
After doing some major yard work involving cutting down some willow trees and pruning some of our plum trees we had a veritable arsenal of fuel for the “Rambo” of all fires. I sensed great anticipation in the neighbourhood as the combustibles began to mount in the vacant lot next to our house. Even the local virgins appeared to grow restless as the night of the great and inevitable fire approached. The evening had a genuine Lord of the Flies feel to it, and the momentum was mounting.
Off course it was all anticlimactic because no sooner did the flames reach the requisite 20 foot mark and the neighbours house seemed threatened, as was our own; the fire department showed up, dosed the flames, spoiled the fun and gave my dad a very stern warning and I suffered the angst of another missed opportunity at sacrificing a virgin, little realizing what a virgin was, or that I was one.
As an adult I have since returned to my childhood neighbourhood. If I look very carefully and get down on my hands and knees I can still make out the black ash remains of fires long spent and when I close my eyes I can clearly detect the acrid smell of smoke in the air.
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