Fire is cool and lighting things on fire is fun. Almost everyone can agree with that statement. I spent a lot of my childhood playing with fire and accidentally burned a bit of the siding off of my house trying to make a torch. I didn’t ever really think through what I was doing nor the consequences thereof, but soon came a day where it all changed. I had gotten in trouble for breaking things but I didn’t stop. I wasn’t exactly the “role model child” and probably added quite a few grey hairs to my parent’s heads. Eventually, my curiosity about fire got me into more trouble than even a nine-year-old me could ignore.

Throughout most of my childhood, I took piano lessons from a family friend who also happened to be my mom’s best friend. Her name is April. For some reason or another when I was nine she started teaching at the St Pius Catholic Church in town, instead of her house. I entered the church for the first time and was surprised by how dark it was. The nave was giant and the windows didn’t let in much light. Most of the light was coming from the candles lining the walls on the way up to the front of the room.

I started my lesson with April and began to go through songs but I wasn't focused on the music. My eyes kept getting drawn to the candles throughout the room, looking back at me like hundreds of eyes. After I began to mess up notes and trip over myself I was forced to concentrate on the music again. Still, I thought about the fire, and how fun it would be to blow them out, light a few candles, or stick something into the wax (again I was nine). Soon my lesson was done and it was my brother’s turn. There wasn’t anything to do but wait. So I waited, boredom consuming my soul and all I could do is wait. Eventually, I got tired of waiting and left to go to the bathroom, this was my first mistake.

To get to the bathroom I had to walk past all of the fascinating candles. I stopped to look at them and eventually, temptation took over smothering my free will like a snake slowly tightening itself around the little man that was my self-control. I blew one out, this was my second mistake. Once I did that it was too late. The joy of it had my little nine-year-old mind in its clutches and there was no escape from it. I blew another and another out. I didn’t even realize how many I had blown out until there was none left. The joy and fun of it left me so suddenly that I was shocked. Until under a stand, I found one of the most dangerous things to give a nine-year-old boy with imagination and poor self-control.. matches.

Oh, what a fool I was for not turning and leaving at that very moment. Instead, the little man named self-control decided this was a good time to go on a nice long vacation. Of course, he brought his friends; intelligence, wisdom, and common sense. To make matter worse he left me with his vicious dog, Pyromaniac. With these key people out of my mind, it didn’t take very long for the matches to worm their way into my head and I took the bait. I lit a match. There’s a satisfaction that only comes from burning things. I don’t mean that in a pyromaniac, must burn everything down sort of way. Just lighting a match has this effect, subtle but there. For a child with cobwebs for brains and a recent lack of the helpful people in my brain, this satisfaction was even more present. After I lit a dozen or so candles it dawned on me that maybe someone would get mad at me for this. So like any sane person I calmly put the matches back where I found them and returned to my seat by the piano, nothing bad happened at the church because of me.

That’s a complete bald-faced lie. I decided the best thing to do would be to hide in the bathroom and continue to light matches. I thought I was being smart about it. Once I burned a match I would run it underwater and then throw it into the garbage. Of course, this might have worked if it was any other garbage can but it never crossed my pea-sized mind that a bathroom’s garbage is primarily filled with paper towels. A smarter person would realize this and not throw matches into it. However, as was becoming increasingly apparent I was not a smart kid. Driven purely by the joy of fire I continue to light matches. I was so focused on my fiery activities that I didn’t notice when someone started banging on the bathroom door.

Fear spiked through me as I realized I might get in trouble for stealing matches from the church so I did the smart thing. I lit all the matches on fire and ran them under the sink before throwing them into the trash and rushing out of the bathroom. It was my brother telling me it was time to go. I tried not to laugh as I realize what I got away with and didn’t spare a second thought for what might have happened to the pack of matches. As we made our way out to the car I heard a faint alarm. I ignored it because it couldn’t possibly be about something I did, after all, I always managed to get out of trouble. At that moment I saw what looked like smoke through the window of the church.

Shortly after that an extremely angry-looking woman I had never seen before come out of the building. She looked like she had just had a wrestling match with Santa on the way down a chimney. She just looked at me like a cow looking at an oncoming train and my heart stopped for a moment. She lumbered towards me and fear froze me in my tracks. She leaned down right next to me and asked in a bone-chilling voice, “did you light the garbage on fire in the bathroom?”. I couldn’t speak or defend myself. I was cornered and caught red-handed at the scene of my crime. There was no way out of trouble this time. April came out a few seconds later and told me she wouldn’t be teaching me anymore.

It wasn’t this alone that hurt but how disappointed she looked while talking to me. I got in more trouble than a day than I have ever been in and I had never seen my mom as livid as she was that day. I hated how disappointed April and my mom looked after that and I didn’t want that to happen again. The change was shocking even for me. Looking back that night was when I decided to stop looking at things with a “how can I do this and not get in trouble” mindset and more of a “Is this something I should be doing”. I was only nine years old at the time but I still hate how my mom looked at me that night.