Time Warp Tuesday --- The Hay Stack

Back when I was little, most of my money went toward 2 things --- Magic and Fireworks. Every year near the 4th of July me and my friend Mark would order plenty of supplies from a place in Ohio. Every year people would come from miles (ok, maybe yards) to see our little show. I figure I have plenty of firework blunders in my past to cover every Tuesday between now and the 4th of July!

So one year we put on our neighborhood show as usual and everything goes great --- except now we are out of fireworks. The following day, we were bored and I remembered that my brother had a few packages of bottle rockets up in his room. Of course we couldn't let those go to waste! So we went up and stole (borrowed?) a package and headed out to the alley to fire them off.

On the other alley toward where we were shooting these off, my dad had a stack of 3 bales of hay he used for an archery target. About 7 rockets into our fun, we realized the hay was ablaze! I am still not sure if it was caused by us or not (as no rockets hit it...but some may have fallen down from the sky on it still hot). We ran over and started kicking it and hitting it with tree branches but it kept getting worse and worse.

So I ran into the house to call the fire department. As was the norm, I picked up the phone and my sister Dana was on it. I told her to hurry up and hang up, but she refused! There was nothing short of a miracle that could ever get her off the phone in those days, so rather than keep trying, we decided to run the block-and-a-half to Mark's house and call.

When we got to Mark's house, his mom was outside. We told her to dial 911, but she didn't believe us! But it didn't take much more convincing when you looked in the sky above my house and could now see a huge black cloud of smoke. So as is the norm in my town for any "emergency" big or small, 4 police cars, 3 firetrucks, 2 ambulances come flying in and put the fire out.

Now...I wish I could say that was the end of the story. But as I said, we only used about 7 bottle rockets in the package of 12, so we still had 5 left! Find out next Tuesday what happens when one of those 5 remaining bottle rockets "accidentally" gets lit!