Hot Milk

“Why is it when you’re thirteen you can cause anything to burst into flames?”

When I was eleven, twelve, thirteen, setting things on fire was not only easy as picking your nose, it was totally where it was at—bugs, G.I. Joes (doused with gasoline), paper, ye olde hairspray & lighter routine—I could (and did) burn any and everything. It’s a wonder no one was killed.

Recently we ran out of propane. The company couldn’t deliver for a while. Our landlords lent us a camp stove. We didn’t have a match or a lighter, so we got creative with the contents of the fridge for a while.

Then we got tired of eating cheese sandwiches; we needed something hot. Anything. Milk. We needed to make fire somehow. Our landlords were asleep. We live far from the Kangaroo. Gas station, I mean.

“What have we got that will burn?”

No matches. No lighter.

“We have the car lighter! Let’s try that!”

I thought I remembered that you could somehow set something on fire with a car’s cigarette lighter. My dad once showed me how he “personalized” one of his old baseball gloves using the car lighter as a branding tool.

We brought every flammable material known to man out to the car, in hopes of igniting a candle to bring in and light the portable camp stove with.

Incense sticks wouldn’t burn. They’re designed to burn. You can’t even wave those out sometimes once they catch without silly, grandiose gestures. But on the car lighter? Forget it. Wouldn’t even hold a glow, no matter how much I did blow. I blew ‘til I was blue and still zero combustion.

“This sucks,” I said to my wife. “What would I do if I was marooned on an island?”

I tried paper towels, shredded to thin, thin shreds. Surely they will ignite. No. I tried Q-tips dipped in hand sanitizer. There are warnings all over that stuff to keep it away from flame. Surely that means it will burn at the slightest provocation. No.

My wife tried her best. She brought out ghee-soaked cotton wicks. No amount of coaxing or oxygenation via combined, multidirectional huffing and puffing could coax out even the beginnings of the tiniest flame from any flammable substance in our possession.

What, are those things designed to only light cigarettes? Big applause to cigarette lighter manufacturers for keeping us all safe. Finally we gave up, or passed out from lack of oxygen, I can’t remember.

It’s a good thing I wasn’t thirteen, or I would’ve easily figured out a real cool way to not only get things going on the camp stove, but set in motion a conflagration major enough to be seen from space.