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Learning to control the fire.

When I was about five I learnt my first lesson of just what fire could do. My brother and I had been playing in our parents garage with a box of matches. The floor was concrete but it had this woven grass matting across it. Needless to say it only took a couple of minutes for a majority of the floor to catch fire and the Dad dragging the still burning matting out in to the garden and stamping on it to put it out. That was a close call that we didn’t burn the whole garage down. We sure did pay for that but do you think that you would learn at that age??? Not really

Then a handful of years, later I was playing with a cigarette lighter in the back of mums van and somehow set the seats in the back alight. I remember the panic of running for the garden hose and trying to stretch it so that I would reach the back of the van. I swung the back door open and started hosing down the fire. Around this time the neighbour comes out of her house and calmly looks at me hosing out the back of the burning van and says to me “Oh the vans on fire, I thought someone was having a BBQ… Don’t you think you should tell your parents?” I quickly dropped the hose and ran inside to get Dad. Again He puts out the fire and this time my punishment was harsher as I should have know better by ten than to set the car on fire. Then I received no pocket money for 6 months and was grounded for what seemed much longer. So that was me, I learnt my lesson that Mark and Fire Don’t mix… Well not really.

When Mum got a new van and I was almost 21 at this stage, I asked if I could borrow it to get to work. Mum was not fussed about this as I had finally built her trust after not setting her car alight for at least 10 years now. As I pulled off the freeway onto Brunswick Street, I thought that there was some smoke in the car but dismissed it and thought I was seeing things. So I drove further up Brunswick Street and looked into the back and it was full of smoke and the back of my seat was on fire. This was about 9pm on a Friday night so the street was pretty busy. I jumped around to the back and found a blanket in the back and attempted to try to put the fire out. A guy came out of one of the shops with a fire extinguisher but it didn’t last too long as the fire had already hit the hood lining and burning cloth had started to fall from the roof all over the car. Within two minutes the whole car was a ball of fire so all I could do is stand back and watch it burn until the fire brigade came to put it out. After they did I assessed the damage to Mums car. It was completely gutted a lot of the metal was warped due to the heat it was giving off. And as I had pulled up in the middle of the street I had also scorched two cars that were parked at the side of the road as well.

A police officer came over as the car was being prepared to be towed and asked if there was anything else he could do before he left. And I said yes can you call my mother and tell her that her car was burnt and there is nothing left? He just laughed and looked at me and said “sorry mate, your on your own”. Damn.

So I call home and Mum answered and I tell her “Mum your van caught fire and it’s gone, there’s nothing left.” And she kept asking me where I was and to stop joking. This went on for a few minutes so I asked her to put Dad on.
“Yes Son?”
“Pops, the cars F@£$ed, its gone!”
“Are you OK?”
“Yes Pop I’m fine”

All the while I can hear mom in the background telling Dad to tell me to get this and that out of the car. But she didn’t realize just how much it had burnt.

I think that was the day that I finally decided to use the power of flame for good and create things rather than destroy them.