It was a dark and stormy night. I was fourteen years old. It was the middle of winter and our heat had gone out. Again. Coming from a long line of family who had also coasted in on fumes, my dad decided to fix it himself. I was in my bedroom, listening to the Jackson 5 and writing up a Science lab, with a space heater at my feet. I could hear, through the vent, the normal sounds that came with my dad fixing things.
Banging. Clanging. Cussing.
I knew my mom was minutes away from calling a repairman, so I prayed that I would soon hear the familiar click of the furnace, so that an argument would be avoided. What I heard next was not a click. It was not a bang. It was not a clang. It was not a @#$*. It was the closest sound I had ever heard in my life to a KA-POW! I looked over to my heating vent and saw a puff of smoke come out of it. And then I heard my mother screaming. I flew downstairs to see smoke in the kitchen and smoke billowing from under the door of the basement, where my mother stood, calling frantically for my father. With still no response, my mom and I looked at each other, knowing someone was going to have to go down to see what happened. My little brother and sister stood huddled at my mom's legs, eyes wide with fright. Then, we heard his familiar footsteps. We backed up to give him room. When he reached the top of the stairs and the smoke had cleared, we gasped. We did not greet my father with cheers that he was alive, or hugs of relief. We met him with laughter.
My dad looked like Wile E. Coyote after an ACME stunt gone incredibly wrong.
What little hair he had left on his head when he had gone downstairs, was now singed to his scalp. His eyebrows were completely gone, and his moustache was burnt and frayed and sticking straight out from his upper lip. Angry at the utter lack of support from his family, my dad pushed past us to the bathroom mirror, to survey the damage. As he stood wiping the black off of his forehead and from around his eyes, I tapped my brother on the shoulder and pointed to my dad's legs. One thing I will always remember about my dad, is that he is perpetually hot. So, no matter the season or temperature, he always performed home repairs wearing a pair of cutoff shorts and no shirt. That night was no different. And the explosion had burnt every last hair off of my dad's legs. As our eyes drifted upward, we saw that the ten hairs that my dad had proudly displayed on his chest since puberty, were also gone. When we all composed ourselves from hysterical laughter, my mom spoke. "Larry, I yelled and yelled for you. I was worried! Why didn't you answer??" He slowly turned to look at her. "I couldn't answer you," he calmly replied, "because I was putting out the FIRE that was on my FACE!!!" And with that, the laughter started all over again.
In the end, the culprit was a faulty pilot light. Dad had tried to relight it with a Bic lighter, but hadn't checked to see if the gas was off, and it blew him all the way across the basement. A few days later, Dad began speaking to all of us again and soon found humor in what had happened. Aero Oil installed a new furnace the following week. And Dad's body hair grew back, just like normal.
But he never touched a lighter, again.
Happy Father's Day, Dad!!
