I was probably eight or nine years old, living in Indiana, and I was trying to start a charcoal fire in a cooker in our backyard.
The fire was not going well.
I remember being dissatisfied with it. I wanted to help it along. At that age, I already had the instinct to solve a problem when something wasn’t working the way I thought it should.
So I went and got a five-gallon can of gasoline.
I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking, beyond the simple idea that gasoline would give the fire the boost it needed. In one sense, the reasoning was correct.
It certainly did.
I poured some gasoline directly onto the coals.
The fire leaped up into my face.
In an instant, my face was on fire. I staggered backward and dropped the gasoline can. By sheer luck, it landed upright instead of spilling across the ground beside the burning cooker.
I remember enough to know that I reacted quickly. I backed away, dropped to the ground, and rolled until the flames on my face were out.
Then I went to the back door and called for my mother.
“Mom!”
What I remember now is her reaction:
“Oh Mikey, what have you done this time?”
My eyebrows were gone. I’m not sure about my eyelashes. My face was badly burned, and for a long time afterward I had two noticeable red marks running vertically down my cheeks. In an earlier telling of the story, I remembered those scars lasting for about a year before they finally faded.
Eventually they disappeared.
What never disappeared was the memory.
I can still see the backyard. I can still see the charcoal not burning the way I wanted. I can still remember lifting that gasoline can and thinking, in effect:
I can fix this.
Looking back, I think the story says something about me that was already there at eight or nine years old.
I wasn’t trying to be reckless.
I was trying to solve a problem.
I simply had no idea how powerful my solution was going to be.
And somehow, once again, I survived the experiment.