I've Gotta Tell You Something, Mom

  

The year was 1988 a few days after the 4th of July when my son came home and said, "I've gotta tell you something, Mom". My heart sank but I sat and listened to the son who never did anything wrong. He had always watched and listened to what everyone else was doing and managed to keep himself out of the doghouse by just getting out of the way. He'd gotten good marks all through school and never caused a problem. "I think I burned a house down" was his next statement.

He and his friend John had found some fireworks that were left over from the July 4th celebration and decided to set them off in John's backyard. After the bottle rockets blew they couldn't find the remnants so they left to do something else. When they got back fire engines and police cars were lined up in front of John's next door neighbor's house. They readily told the police that they had set off bottle rockets and didn't know where they had gone.

The next day the paper announced that two boys (unnamed) had set off fireworks and that they were responsible for the burning of the house. I called John's Mom in a panic and she said not to worry about it right then it would take a while for the investigation. Eleven or twelve firemen had been taken to the hospital with toxic smoke poisoning and the investigators were going to find out why.

About two months later Dave was called to a lawyer's office to give a deposition and he told the attorneys for the insurance companies they had set off fireworks and hadn't found where they had landed and they didn't know if they had caused a fire or not.

We never heard anything more about it directly but the paper published a story about the house and a lawsuit the firemen had started against the insurance companies.

It wasn't until a few years later that we heard the house had faulty wiring and some weird kind of insulation in the attic and that the investigators thought the fire had been caused when the wiring had sparked and started a fire that eventually ignited the wood shingled roof and then the house before anyone saw the flames.

Does this look like a "firestarter"? His sweet innocent face looked the same at three years old as it did in high school in 1988 and still does to this day.