To Build a Fire

Before we moved to the new house in Redlands, before Polly was born (therefore before I was 5), and before my family was awake one morning, I started a fire.

Early one cold morning, I went to the downstairs bathroom. This bathroom was paved with small octagonal black and white tiles, in a compelling checkerboard pattern. A small gas heater, built into the wall, heated the bathroom. Beige tiles surrounded the heater on the wall. A cast iron grill with repeating gothic arches covered the burners, to keep us safe from the flames.

No one had ever told me not to light the fire and I was cold and curious. I was the sort of child who said always “But you didn’t tell me not to!” My mother smoked - I knew where to get matches. As I had seen my mother do, I held a lit match to the burner while I turned the gas key. The match went out before the burner caught. I fumbled turning off the gas – worried; I had been told that it was dangerous for unlit gas to come into the room. I tried a few more matches unsuccessfully.

Then, giving up on matches, I quietly got a candle from the kitchen. I lit the candle. It flared and frightened me.  The candle was too fat to fit through the gothic arches. I was skittish anyway because I suspected that what I was doing would be considered bad behavior. I threw the lit candle into a wastebasket, which had a few papers in it. The papers caught fire. I put the wastebasket in the bathtub and ran, panicked, to my parents’ bedroom and whispered “Help, Daddy!”

Daddy followed immediately and took care of the fire by turning on the bathtub spigot. He turned on the heater and sat me beside him on the edge of the bathtub. I was shaking from the near disaster. I was also worried that I would be punished. We talked quietly about the dangers of what had happened. Daddy said I had made a bad situation but had reacted well to it.

His conversation meandered from fire to the sun. He started to explain the relationship of the sun to the earth and the planets and the moon. He asked me to bring him an orange and a grapefruit from the kitchen. Then, with the aid of the round brass bathroom lock, the doorknob, the orange and the grapefruit, Daddy gave me my first and most practical lesson in the structure of our solar system.