Butchy saw it first, tucked neatly behind the bar’s sink, a $10 bill. It was early December, and I knew the tradition. Each Christmas my grandfather, who couldn’t travel and join us for Christmas sent $10 to buy our Christmas tree. Mom tucked it behind the bar until it was time to make the big buy. My best friends, Butchy and Stevie got so excited with the treasure, I got excited too. Treated as treasure found, it was instantly seen as free money.
YEAH! That’s right Butchy, you found BIG MONEY!” Ten dollars in the 50s, is about as rich as three kids can get.
Negotiations started immediately:
Me — “You found it Butchy, but it is my house, my sink, so it is my $10.”
Butchy — “OK! Split it”.
Stevie- “That’s not fair, what about me, I was here too.”
Me — “What are you talking about, you didn’t find it, it isn’t your house. You don’t get anything”
Stevie — “That’s not right, let’s ask your mother.”
Stevie, who would become a good lawyer, always had a knack for ending an argument with just the right words.
On the way to the Five & Dime the discussion was about toys, a new football, a bunch of trading cards with gum, or . . . “I got it,” I said, “the toy to beat all toys. We have enough money here to buy a Zippo cigarette lighter.” The idea was an immediate hit, not because we smoked, at least not yet, but because we were fascinated with that parental no-no – FIRE.
Just smart enough to know that a store might balk at selling three kids lighters, we devised a brilliant and as it turns out successful plan.
Since Stevie’s handwriting was clearly at a crude stage and I could barely read, let alone write, Butchy got the honors. As neatly as he could, which was pretty darn good as I recall, he wrote out: “I hav givn Kimmy $10 to by three liters — (signed) Mrs. Kimball.”
The clerk took a second look but didn’t seem to mind selling us the lighters or that my mom was illiterate. So, with lighters in hand, off we ran toward the arroyo and into neighborhood history.
The arroyo, a dry four-foot-rut in the neighborhood landscape that had water in it maybe six days a year. It ran right by our house, sheathed in a thick forest of thirsty mesquite trees and tall baked brown grasses.
With all the life-molding first time experiences that would come that day, it wasn’t Mr. Franklin, looking out his window, who first saw the smoke billowing over the neighborhood, not the distant approaching sirens that converged on the scene, nor even the odd smacking sound my mother’s lips made when she heard it was me, that sticks in my mind. It was the speed at which a Zippo could turn solitude into Armageddon when it touches blades of dried grass in a breeze under a forest of parched trees.
I can’t remember what happened to Stevie or Butchy that day, but I would be put to death immediately. My mother, having struggled with this odd, and now clearly dangerous child for some years, cracked.
The fire was not what upset her, it was the “Thou shall not steal” stuff I would get it for. I got one good whack with my belt for every dollar we took.
But I got the best of it. Kids, once adults, are forever blaming their moms for imagined errors in their upbringing. The “welts” from the fire of ’56 would become my most effective weapon as I needled the screeching denials of a mother for the next half-century.
I thought I got the best of it. I got the $10, the lighters (she assumed the Fire Department had confiscated them — they had not), and my exaggerated stories about “bloody welts” from my (well-deserved) whipping, up until she wore with pride the “IT’S ALL MY FAULT” tee shirt I got her on her 70th birthday.