February 1962.

My grandmother told me it was DANG cold. I’m thinking it was about 55 below zero and just too cold for baseball to be played while wearing black buckle boots and a zip-up snow suit. The gang tried that last winter and found that catching and throwing the ball while wearing three pairs of mittens was not as fun. We ruined three ball bats that exploded when the famous “slow ball” somehow met the bat... they were all slow balls that game. Exploding bats that splintered into four pieces was new to us. The duct tape and Elmer’s glue was not a surefire fix at below-zero temperatures. We moved on to building fires and dancing around like we were having warm fun. The cops showed up and asked us if we had homes to go to. We replied honestly but said we had to wait for the ball bats to completely finish burning. They shook their heads and slowly drove away. Cops are strange sometimes.

My mother is a beautician and her customers used gobs of hairspray. I learned that mom would “tease their hair “ so it stood about a foot high and then hairspray it so it would last about a month. The women couldn’t wear hats on top of the hair stack, so they just draped a huge scarf or bath towel over their hair on windy days or if it was raining. To me, they all looked like Frankenstein’s wife, freshly electrocuted to life.  The good news was mom always had about two dozen empty hair spray cans each week to throw away. 

That February was “real Dang cold, and therefore, fire was our gang’s new attraction. On Birren Avenue, there was an unwritten rule that no garbage could be burned in the backyard until sundown. Clotheslines were used during the day to dry out the clean wash, and one did not want to face the wrath of any woman whose fresh clothes smelled like that night’s burning supper from the burn can. The cans were never burnt, just regular garbage.

My gang each brought a paper bag of fresh garbage one dark and cold night to my house. We torched the garbage and flames were rising about 6 feet from the top of the barrel. I seized the moment and threw 2 dozen empty hairspray cans in the barrel. Bombs away! Explosive kabooms. Real Dang loud kabooms distorted the barrel and shock waves broke some neighbor’s window glass. We weren’t expecting that! We all ran to our homes and we remembered the question that the cops had asked us. It was a prophecy statement and we weren’t accustomed to prophecy... YET!

Somehow my mother figured out from listening to the party line that I might have been involved. I never wanted hairspray cans in our burn barrel again, so after that, I moved them to Sunny Side Street and waited for the right night, and threw them in Dave Lemaster’s barrel. His house had thicker windows.

Hug your kids and love your Dang neighbors.
– Nelly