Time Warp Tuesday --- The Bottle Rocket

Last week I told you about the bottle rockets I had taken from my brother's room and only got through a few of them before we saw a fire break out...so we still had a few of them left. A couple of days later I was down the street with the usual bunch of friends: Mark, Joel, Chad, Jim, Gretchen, Brooke, and Steve. We were at Joel and Gretchen's house (they only lived a block away from me) and I had taken the remaining bottle rockets down the street to their house with me.

Our neighborhood was filled with very nice people and everyone on the street knew each other. However, there was one older lady across the street that just didn't like us. Probably from walking through her flower's during "kick the can" or hitting her house while playing "tennis ball" or throwing corn at the window around Halloween...I guess she had a lot of reason why she wasn't a fan of ours.

As we were waiting for it to get dark, Mark had a few packs of sparklers we were playing around with. I had the bottle rockets laying on the ground and I made the comment to make sure nobody got too close to them with their sparklers. Joel was positive that sparks from a sparkler would never light a wick, and as the debate grew, we had to test the theory. So he holds a sparkler over one of the bottle rockets, and sure enough the wick starts to burn!

The bottle rocket takes off and heads across the street. Of all places it is heading directly for the old lady's house that didn't like us. I sure you all remember the old aluminum doors people used as a screen door with the real thin metal...well, with perfect timing...just as that bottle rocket reached her house and went directly for the center of this door, it exploded. And when I say it exploded, the combination of the regular bottle rocket explosion and this metal door was one of the loudest explosions I've ever heard! May not have been the "shot heard round the world" but definitely around the neighborhood!

So like all kids do, we ran. It's funny when you are a kid and someone you know does something bad...you run. Joel was the only one who really did anything wrong, but I guess it is just a childhood instinct to get the heck out of there anyway! We ran around back and into Joel's basement, through the house, and into the attic where we were all peaking out the window. It was loud enough that all the neighbor's heard and were all congregating outside. Before long the police showed up and was talking to the lady and they found the remains of the bottle rocket on her porch. From the window, we could see the remaining 4 bottle rockets still laying on the ground out front. Thankfully none of the police or neighbors ever saw them.

As I headed home after everything calmed down, I gather up the last 4 bottle rockets. What would I do with these now? Well, for the first time in my life I had enough excitement with fireworks for one summer, and they went back into my brother's drawer.