Dish Fire

Katiedid Langrock
Fri, 29 Jan 2021 21:00:00 -0800
Lifestyle

When I was a kid, my dad set our toilet seat on fire.

This isn't an attempt at a scatological joke. Beans had nothing to do with it.

The seat had once been a hip-to-the-late-'80s light blue color. After the infamous toilet seat fire, it became a bubbled orangish brown that drooped in hardened teardrops of its previous baby blue like a Salvador Dali painting. I wanted to keep it, but within a week, we had a new toilet seat. White porcelain. Boring.
Updated: Sat Jan 30, 2021

When I was a kid, my dad set our toilet seat on fire.

This isn't an attempt at a scatological joke. Beans had nothing to do with it.

The seat had once been a hip-to-the-late-'80s light blue color. After the infamous toilet seat fire, it became a bubbled orangish brown that drooped in hardened teardrops of its previous baby blue like a Salvador Dali painting. I wanted to keep it, but within a week, we had a new toilet seat. White porcelain. Boring.

I always wanted to keep the evidence of our fires when I was a kid. The melted toilet seat could have served as a great talking point. Conversation lacking? Time for a tour of the house, starting with the bathroom! I believed that all household items that had burned, charred and melted told a story. And there were always plenty of stories to tell.

My parents bonded over the realization that they had both sustained serious burns to their hands while roasting marshmallows in the summer of '63. Their marriage followed this tradition. One of my earliest memories is of being in the kitchen when my dad pulled a hot pan from the oven using nothing but paper towels. Because his hands were not well protected from the extreme heat, he dropped the pan on our linoleum kitchen floor; the steam rose and burned my cheeks. Some time later, my dad told me the steam was the reason my young cheeks were so rosy. For years, I believed him.

The charred linoleum floor was not kept, despite my pleas. After a month or so, it was patched with bright new white linoleum tiles that stood out against the rest of our slightly-yellowed-from-wear tiles as a cover-up to our error rather than a charred celebration of it. From then on, I used my rosy cheeks as the evidence to tell the tale of the floor fire.

There was the microwave explosion that knocked my dad's glasses off and shattered them. The deck fire. The Christmas tree fire. The grill fire. The back fence fire. (To be fair, the grill fire and the back fence fire were really the same fire.) And of course, there was the time hot oil in a frying pan caught fire and my dad ran past the perfectly good sink and attempted to drown the flames in our toilet but neglected to put the toilet seat up before throwing the flaming pan into the toilet water.

No wonder my parents panicked when they found my secret lighter when I was 14. Knowing my genetics, they were probably less scared of my smoking cigarettes and more scared of my burning the house down. We seem to manage to light the oddest things on fire.

So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that yesterday I set my dish drying rack on fire.

Since moving in to the RV, I have set off the fire alarm about three times a day for non-fires. The RV has a very sensitive fire alarm, which I guess makes sense, seeing as we are sitting atop 55 gallons of gasoline and a 9.8-gallon propane tank. Something as easy as frying an egg will set off the alarm.

"Mama, can't we just unplug this stupid thing?" my son always asks as he fans the screeching alarm.

No way. If my childhood with a burnt toilet has taught me anything, it's that you never know when and where you might have fire.

Yesterday I was roasting vegetables for lunch. It usually takes about a dozen attempts at sparking the pilot light for the oven to catch, but it was taking longer than usual. I was crouched down, watching the oven, so I didn't see that what I had actually been turning on was the stovetop.

The fire alarm went off.

Our plastic dish rack, which sits atop the stove when we are not using it, was consumed in orange flames. I grabbed it and threw it out the door — the same move my dad did when he set the deck on fire. The dish rack landed on the grass. I stamped out the flames.

My son looked at the damage — a huge black hole where the bottom had once been. Melted, collapsed sides.

"Guess it's time for a new dish rack," I said.

"No-o-o-!" my son protested. "Can't we find a way to still use it? It makes a great story."

It runs in the family.