Lighting The Gas Stove
My mother was a country woman. She was born in early 1906 and raised on a poor, lonely farm in Kentucky that sat atop a ridge that fell off to hollers on either side. There were three rooms in that house. There was no plumbing. There was no gas or electricity for either heat or light. They used oil lanterns and old-fashioned, black wood stoves that were flat on top. Up there sat a bucket or a kettle that heated water or coffee. There was no outhouse outside. By the time I came along when she was almost 40, she was a pretty unconventional woman by modern standards in the 1940’s.
For example, she believed that the windows should be open at night and let in lots of fresh air. Even in the dead of winter. She used to tell me that when she was a girl and woke up in the mornings out on top of that Kentucky ridge, the water in the bucket in the kitchen would be rock hard solid ice. So an open window was no big deal, especially if there were several winter coats piled a foot high on your bed, which is what she used to do to me as a young boy. I would get in the bed, and she would begin her routine of emptying her closet and stacking her entire wardrobe on top of me. To this day, when I go to bed, I long to be buried beneath a avalanche of heavy woolen garments heaped high and deep like plywood.
My mother had two rooms on the second floor in the house in which I was raised. The living room and the kitchen. That was it. She slept in the living room. I slept in the kitchen. The kitchen, besides the refrigerator, the oven, and the dining table, contained a twin bed, a self-contained, antique kitchen baker’s cabinet with a flour bin and sifter (sometimes called a Hoosier cabinet), and a wardrobe with drawers. When I first leaped onto the mattress, the bed was like laying on an ice table. So I would knot up in a ball as Mom began her system of throwing heavy pelts on top of me to hold in the heat while my teeth clacked together like a skeleton. Mom didn’t believe in sheets either. I never heard of a sheet on a bed until I got to college. The coats lay on top of a layer of coarse wool blankets that scratched against me like I was wearing a hair shirt. But as I began to warm, I started to stretch out my spindly legs. The blankets and coats were an insulated barrier like fat on a walrus against the dropping temperatures in the room. It became like a Dutch oven under those coats. I pulled them up over my head with only my nose breathing the cold air from a small hole that kept me from suffocating. I was soon fast asleep and woke up in the morning in the exact same position I last remember being in simply because the lead coats were like an iron press on top of bacon at The Waffle House.
But now came the problem. I had to get up. The temperature could be in the 20’s. I would bolt for the window, shut it, and fire up the gas oven in the kitchen. My mother feared gas like the Ebola virus and continually warned me about the prospect of it blowing up the house. So whenever she went to work while I was at school, or when she left in the morning before I awoke, she always turned off all the stoves, which, of course, were gas. When I came home from school in the afternoon, the house was as cold as a meat freezer, just like it had been during the night. And it remained that way till she came home because I was to never touch the stove in the living room else I blow myself and the coats into the next world.
In the living room was an ancient looking gas stove that required cautious manual stimulation. It stood about three feet high on four short, claw feet and had a drop-down door on the front of it that fell forward when it was opened by a handle. The front of the the stove angled slightly back like the sloping head of an American Indian. The face of the door had sixteen small, translucent, yellowish, mica windows in it that did not burn or break under the tremendous heat the stove threw off. Behind the door and inside the stove sat a bed of pinkish lava donuts that glowed red hot and intensified the stove’s hot breath. From the crown of the stove, a six inch pipe came straight up out of its head, made a 90 degree right angle half way toward the ceiling and then disappeared into the wall of the house and into the chimney that let dangerous fumes escape.
That is the way the stove looked to my mother and everyone else. But that is not the way the stove looked to me. I would come into the cold room and see this thing sitting there with its yellow eyes looking straight forward from its oblong shaped head and standing on its four gnarled, short arms as if it were leaning on its knuckles like a frozen metal mutant. Its silver, multi-eyed face was fastened at attention while a silver arm from the wall came in and put its hand in the top of the stove’s head and locked its gaze straight ahead until its eyes glowed red. In that cold, dark room, that stove looked like a graven image. It never moved. Thank God it never looked at me. It just sat silently, ice-cold, as my active imagination conjured up images of the stove turning turning slightly towards me and staring. I soon had to leave the room.
To my mother, it was A stove, not THE stove. She respected it, but she did not fear it or see it sitting there like an malevolent idol as I did. It was inanimate, merely a device. Nothing more.
So when Mom lit the stove, it was a pretty routine exercise, although it did require care. My mother would crouch down on her knees, push open a large cardboard box filled with matches that rattled when it was shaken, extract a wooden stick with a blue nob and a red tip welded on the end like a cotton swab on the end of a Q-tip, push the box back within itself, and then drag the match across the sandpaper strip on the side. The match would flare to flame as she scratched it across the course belt of emory paper. The near empty box would amplify the sound of the match strike like a small speaker. So far so good. Now came the dangerous part. A narrow pipe protruded out from the bottom and side of the stove. Through this pipe a stream of invisible gas tinged with a sulfur scent blew through a tiny opening and into the stove’s cavernous belly. As she leaned toward the hole with the blue flame working its way toward her fingers, she would turn a stiff knob that opened the deadly hole out of which the good but evil gas would emit. The match was there at the front door waiting for the hissing gas. When the pressure in the pipe pushed the gas through that narrow opening and into the hot arms of the flame, it was like two lovers connecting, and a marriage of ignition exploded inches away inside the stove’s midriff. There was an instantaneous flash inside the stove accompanied by a swoosh that shot blue flames across the burners from scores of little holes underneath those donuts, and heat began to emanate into our house. I don’t ever remember her not practicing that litany of procedure in that order.
But this was a ritual that my mother was always suspicious of because sometimes you would hear of a frame house blowing into a million pieces due to some idiot not being careful around one of these gas heaters. So with every light, my mother would go into Bible themes about sinners being in the hands of an angry God of fire as her trembling fingers came near the gas. Thus, she told me to never touch the stove. There was nothing for her to fear. I would have frozen to death before touching that thing. I loathed the stove’s malignant face. In spite of that, within ten minutes, the hated stove was throwing off wonderful heat as I ventured my backside toward it and let it penetrate my pants to the point of setting them on fire.
All was wonderful. We were warm. Life was good. That is, as long as Mom was lighting the stove. But one day Mom came to me and said she thought I was ready to take the next step. The next step? She said she was going to teach me how to light the stove without blowing up the house, the neighborhood, and the coats. She was probably also getting tired of coming home to a house where we could have hung frozen sides of beef. So one day she took me into the living room where the stove sat looking out at me with those sixteen mustard-shaded eyes. Before she assumed the position of kneeling like a penitent before the sixteen-eyed, silver god that could take our lives if we didn’t perform our ritual to its satisfaction, she waxed eloquent once again with Southern Baptist sermon excerpts about the danger of messing with and not giving The Stove the utmost respect as we fed him with life-giving fire. It was like my Bar Mitzvah. I had now reached the age of accountability and was going to give our heat-giving god his due. As she handed me the matches, we both knelt down as if to pray to The Stove. On this day, I would turn the knob and release the dragon. I had seen that done a thousand times - always, mind you, with a reminder of God’s presence. But turning that knob myself for the first time was like opening the basket lid to a cobra. She told me to select a match from the box. As my hands quivered, I could hear them rattling inside, a portentous sound, as I picked up the container that was the size of a half of a brick. I nominated one for the task as my mother breathed softly beside me and whispered, “Whatever you do, be very careful.” I was scared crapless. As I whisked the tender on the box, it erupted in flame and the others rattled like Eastern Diamondbacks inside. I brought the match low to the cave’s exit where the dragon would come forth. Now the knob. The knob was tight and hard to turn. That seemed fitting and made me grateful. It was like cranking a crusty, heavy door that housed a terrible being. I heard the distinct wheeze of gas issuing out and denoted the sulfurous smell. Instantly, the gas caught the ignition and fired into the stove with the familiar sound of flame rushing through the holes.
From that day on, it was me and The Stove. I lit it often, but I never became comfortable with it. I always approached The Stove, that gas handle, the jangle of those matches, and the end of the gas pipe like I was putting my hand inside a basement electrical box of live circuit breakers while standing in a bathtub of water with bare feet in copper shoes while in complete darkness.
One winter day in high school, I came home on a cold, dark and dreary day. The chill penetrated the house. Mom would be home from work soon. So I wanted the house to be cozy for her when she stepped inside. Once the old stove got going, iciness dissipated before its warm respiration. Its long, warm arms wrapped its recipients in their welcoming embrace. Stand in front of it when those coals got red, and its fingers would swarm up your shirt. The stove was the center of the house and the source of our comfort.
But to get there, the stove had to be transformed from Hyde into Jekyll. It had to be kindled through the turning of that valve that released treacherous, invisible gas that was rendered safe through the timely ignition of a spark or flame. That was the gauntlet that one had to navigate to transition from wintery rawness to homey repose. As I opened the door and stepped lightly into the quiet, dark room where the cold stove sat silently, I looked at its silver-painted face with its sixteen clouded, pale-yellow eyes looking straight ahead through its door. It seemed to kneel over and rest on its knuckles like it was going to spring across the room. Behind those eyes in its hollow body lay a bed of razor-edged lava donuts that would roar its torso into an inferno. There they rested in dormancy waiting for deadly gas-turned-to-flame to sibilate through the vents. Again, out of the top of its head I saw that six inch pipe come straight up and right-angle into the chimney. It looked like a robot connected to the mother ship by some immobile lifeline. As it rested in the dark shadows of Mom’s room, the stove seemed to have some kind of dark personality at this time of day. It had sat in cold sleep all alone since the night before, lifeless and without breath. Cold had slowly penetrated its surface when the life-giving gas was cut off the previous night. It ticked to silence as every molecule of its being came to cold room temperature, leaving it helpless to come to life on its own like “The Thing” frozen in the arctic ice.
I could hear the floor creak below the carpet as I drew near and bent down in my winter coat as if in worship before the stove. I turned the ominous valve and listened for the whistle of the imperceptible, malodorous gas escape into the confines of its belly. I reached for the box of wooden matches that always sat next to and brought to life the idol. I slid the box open and took a wooden stick at the end of which sat that small red and blue blob that sparked to flame when scratched on a rough veneer. All I was doing was correct. I had seen it done a hundred times by my mother. The only problem was - as I looked back on the scene moments later - that the sequence in which this procedure was being done was incorrect. The match should have been struck first and posted up to wait for the gas to excrete from the valve. Instead, the gas was pouring from the pipe, and I was taking precious time getting the match to flare to life. Cherished seconds were allowing gas into the wider room, not just inside the fetish itself.
At last the match came to life. I was a foot and a half away from the pipe as I began to descend toward the stove.
The next impression I had was that it was the Second Coming. There was a loud swoosh and a pop akin to a soft blast, sort of like taking your hand and slamming it into a plastic bag filled with air, followed by a flash of lightning. My face felt like it was on fire. I stood up over the idol whose procedure I had violated as if I had put my hands on the holy Ark of the Covenant. I ran over to the mirror to see what had happened. It was a good thing I had clothes on because the top layer of epidermis on all of my exposed skin had just been peeled, yea, cooked off. I looked as if I had been peering directly into the sun while taking six weeks of radiation treatments for cancer. But something else looked really strange. I leaned into the mirror. Something was wrong with my eyebrows. Normally they were black. But now they were the color of dust or sand. The front part of the hair on my head was also the color of the Sahara Desert and singed to a crisp. When I scrunched my eyebrows together to wonder what had taken place, I saw them drop from my face like snow.
That pretty much did it for me. To this day, I am very timorous around anything that ignites gas. Since the stove, I now light gas appliances as if I am holding a flag pole with a match on the end of it. Recently I was reading how to light the propane gas heater on my trailer. I heard that when propane ignites, it expands twenty seven times its size. So I leaned back in the darkness, shielded my face with my arm, and offered my hand as a sacrifice while holding a blue flame on the end of an electronic lighter with a long end. Even as I did that, I said to myself, “I have a bad feeling about this.” Something must have gone wrong. When I brought the flame up to the hole, a rocket of fire in the shape of a baseball bat backed out of the hole and vaporized the hair off of my right hand and wrist. From now on, Linda is going to have to light the heater on the RV or freeze to death. As Mark Twain used to say, “If a cat sits on a hot stove, he’ll never sit on a hot stove again. In fact, he won’t even sit on a cold stove.”
For example, she believed that the windows should be open at night and let in lots of fresh air. Even in the dead of winter. She used to tell me that when she was a girl and woke up in the mornings out on top of that Kentucky ridge, the water in the bucket in the kitchen would be rock hard solid ice. So an open window was no big deal, especially if there were several winter coats piled a foot high on your bed, which is what she used to do to me as a young boy. I would get in the bed, and she would begin her routine of emptying her closet and stacking her entire wardrobe on top of me. To this day, when I go to bed, I long to be buried beneath a avalanche of heavy woolen garments heaped high and deep like plywood.
My mother had two rooms on the second floor in the house in which I was raised. The living room and the kitchen. That was it. She slept in the living room. I slept in the kitchen. The kitchen, besides the refrigerator, the oven, and the dining table, contained a twin bed, a self-contained, antique kitchen baker’s cabinet with a flour bin and sifter (sometimes called a Hoosier cabinet), and a wardrobe with drawers. When I first leaped onto the mattress, the bed was like laying on an ice table. So I would knot up in a ball as Mom began her system of throwing heavy pelts on top of me to hold in the heat while my teeth clacked together like a skeleton. Mom didn’t believe in sheets either. I never heard of a sheet on a bed until I got to college. The coats lay on top of a layer of coarse wool blankets that scratched against me like I was wearing a hair shirt. But as I began to warm, I started to stretch out my spindly legs. The blankets and coats were an insulated barrier like fat on a walrus against the dropping temperatures in the room. It became like a Dutch oven under those coats. I pulled them up over my head with only my nose breathing the cold air from a small hole that kept me from suffocating. I was soon fast asleep and woke up in the morning in the exact same position I last remember being in simply because the lead coats were like an iron press on top of bacon at The Waffle House.
But now came the problem. I had to get up. The temperature could be in the 20’s. I would bolt for the window, shut it, and fire up the gas oven in the kitchen. My mother feared gas like the Ebola virus and continually warned me about the prospect of it blowing up the house. So whenever she went to work while I was at school, or when she left in the morning before I awoke, she always turned off all the stoves, which, of course, were gas. When I came home from school in the afternoon, the house was as cold as a meat freezer, just like it had been during the night. And it remained that way till she came home because I was to never touch the stove in the living room else I blow myself and the coats into the next world.
In the living room was an ancient looking gas stove that required cautious manual stimulation. It stood about three feet high on four short, claw feet and had a drop-down door on the front of it that fell forward when it was opened by a handle. The front of the the stove angled slightly back like the sloping head of an American Indian. The face of the door had sixteen small, translucent, yellowish, mica windows in it that did not burn or break under the tremendous heat the stove threw off. Behind the door and inside the stove sat a bed of pinkish lava donuts that glowed red hot and intensified the stove’s hot breath. From the crown of the stove, a six inch pipe came straight up out of its head, made a 90 degree right angle half way toward the ceiling and then disappeared into the wall of the house and into the chimney that let dangerous fumes escape.
That is the way the stove looked to my mother and everyone else. But that is not the way the stove looked to me. I would come into the cold room and see this thing sitting there with its yellow eyes looking straight forward from its oblong shaped head and standing on its four gnarled, short arms as if it were leaning on its knuckles like a frozen metal mutant. Its silver, multi-eyed face was fastened at attention while a silver arm from the wall came in and put its hand in the top of the stove’s head and locked its gaze straight ahead until its eyes glowed red. In that cold, dark room, that stove looked like a graven image. It never moved. Thank God it never looked at me. It just sat silently, ice-cold, as my active imagination conjured up images of the stove turning turning slightly towards me and staring. I soon had to leave the room.
To my mother, it was A stove, not THE stove. She respected it, but she did not fear it or see it sitting there like an malevolent idol as I did. It was inanimate, merely a device. Nothing more.
So when Mom lit the stove, it was a pretty routine exercise, although it did require care. My mother would crouch down on her knees, push open a large cardboard box filled with matches that rattled when it was shaken, extract a wooden stick with a blue nob and a red tip welded on the end like a cotton swab on the end of a Q-tip, push the box back within itself, and then drag the match across the sandpaper strip on the side. The match would flare to flame as she scratched it across the course belt of emory paper. The near empty box would amplify the sound of the match strike like a small speaker. So far so good. Now came the dangerous part. A narrow pipe protruded out from the bottom and side of the stove. Through this pipe a stream of invisible gas tinged with a sulfur scent blew through a tiny opening and into the stove’s cavernous belly. As she leaned toward the hole with the blue flame working its way toward her fingers, she would turn a stiff knob that opened the deadly hole out of which the good but evil gas would emit. The match was there at the front door waiting for the hissing gas. When the pressure in the pipe pushed the gas through that narrow opening and into the hot arms of the flame, it was like two lovers connecting, and a marriage of ignition exploded inches away inside the stove’s midriff. There was an instantaneous flash inside the stove accompanied by a swoosh that shot blue flames across the burners from scores of little holes underneath those donuts, and heat began to emanate into our house. I don’t ever remember her not practicing that litany of procedure in that order.
But this was a ritual that my mother was always suspicious of because sometimes you would hear of a frame house blowing into a million pieces due to some idiot not being careful around one of these gas heaters. So with every light, my mother would go into Bible themes about sinners being in the hands of an angry God of fire as her trembling fingers came near the gas. Thus, she told me to never touch the stove. There was nothing for her to fear. I would have frozen to death before touching that thing. I loathed the stove’s malignant face. In spite of that, within ten minutes, the hated stove was throwing off wonderful heat as I ventured my backside toward it and let it penetrate my pants to the point of setting them on fire.
All was wonderful. We were warm. Life was good. That is, as long as Mom was lighting the stove. But one day Mom came to me and said she thought I was ready to take the next step. The next step? She said she was going to teach me how to light the stove without blowing up the house, the neighborhood, and the coats. She was probably also getting tired of coming home to a house where we could have hung frozen sides of beef. So one day she took me into the living room where the stove sat looking out at me with those sixteen mustard-shaded eyes. Before she assumed the position of kneeling like a penitent before the sixteen-eyed, silver god that could take our lives if we didn’t perform our ritual to its satisfaction, she waxed eloquent once again with Southern Baptist sermon excerpts about the danger of messing with and not giving The Stove the utmost respect as we fed him with life-giving fire. It was like my Bar Mitzvah. I had now reached the age of accountability and was going to give our heat-giving god his due. As she handed me the matches, we both knelt down as if to pray to The Stove. On this day, I would turn the knob and release the dragon. I had seen that done a thousand times - always, mind you, with a reminder of God’s presence. But turning that knob myself for the first time was like opening the basket lid to a cobra. She told me to select a match from the box. As my hands quivered, I could hear them rattling inside, a portentous sound, as I picked up the container that was the size of a half of a brick. I nominated one for the task as my mother breathed softly beside me and whispered, “Whatever you do, be very careful.” I was scared crapless. As I whisked the tender on the box, it erupted in flame and the others rattled like Eastern Diamondbacks inside. I brought the match low to the cave’s exit where the dragon would come forth. Now the knob. The knob was tight and hard to turn. That seemed fitting and made me grateful. It was like cranking a crusty, heavy door that housed a terrible being. I heard the distinct wheeze of gas issuing out and denoted the sulfurous smell. Instantly, the gas caught the ignition and fired into the stove with the familiar sound of flame rushing through the holes.
From that day on, it was me and The Stove. I lit it often, but I never became comfortable with it. I always approached The Stove, that gas handle, the jangle of those matches, and the end of the gas pipe like I was putting my hand inside a basement electrical box of live circuit breakers while standing in a bathtub of water with bare feet in copper shoes while in complete darkness.
One winter day in high school, I came home on a cold, dark and dreary day. The chill penetrated the house. Mom would be home from work soon. So I wanted the house to be cozy for her when she stepped inside. Once the old stove got going, iciness dissipated before its warm respiration. Its long, warm arms wrapped its recipients in their welcoming embrace. Stand in front of it when those coals got red, and its fingers would swarm up your shirt. The stove was the center of the house and the source of our comfort.
But to get there, the stove had to be transformed from Hyde into Jekyll. It had to be kindled through the turning of that valve that released treacherous, invisible gas that was rendered safe through the timely ignition of a spark or flame. That was the gauntlet that one had to navigate to transition from wintery rawness to homey repose. As I opened the door and stepped lightly into the quiet, dark room where the cold stove sat silently, I looked at its silver-painted face with its sixteen clouded, pale-yellow eyes looking straight ahead through its door. It seemed to kneel over and rest on its knuckles like it was going to spring across the room. Behind those eyes in its hollow body lay a bed of razor-edged lava donuts that would roar its torso into an inferno. There they rested in dormancy waiting for deadly gas-turned-to-flame to sibilate through the vents. Again, out of the top of its head I saw that six inch pipe come straight up and right-angle into the chimney. It looked like a robot connected to the mother ship by some immobile lifeline. As it rested in the dark shadows of Mom’s room, the stove seemed to have some kind of dark personality at this time of day. It had sat in cold sleep all alone since the night before, lifeless and without breath. Cold had slowly penetrated its surface when the life-giving gas was cut off the previous night. It ticked to silence as every molecule of its being came to cold room temperature, leaving it helpless to come to life on its own like “The Thing” frozen in the arctic ice.
I could hear the floor creak below the carpet as I drew near and bent down in my winter coat as if in worship before the stove. I turned the ominous valve and listened for the whistle of the imperceptible, malodorous gas escape into the confines of its belly. I reached for the box of wooden matches that always sat next to and brought to life the idol. I slid the box open and took a wooden stick at the end of which sat that small red and blue blob that sparked to flame when scratched on a rough veneer. All I was doing was correct. I had seen it done a hundred times by my mother. The only problem was - as I looked back on the scene moments later - that the sequence in which this procedure was being done was incorrect. The match should have been struck first and posted up to wait for the gas to excrete from the valve. Instead, the gas was pouring from the pipe, and I was taking precious time getting the match to flare to life. Cherished seconds were allowing gas into the wider room, not just inside the fetish itself.
At last the match came to life. I was a foot and a half away from the pipe as I began to descend toward the stove.
The next impression I had was that it was the Second Coming. There was a loud swoosh and a pop akin to a soft blast, sort of like taking your hand and slamming it into a plastic bag filled with air, followed by a flash of lightning. My face felt like it was on fire. I stood up over the idol whose procedure I had violated as if I had put my hands on the holy Ark of the Covenant. I ran over to the mirror to see what had happened. It was a good thing I had clothes on because the top layer of epidermis on all of my exposed skin had just been peeled, yea, cooked off. I looked as if I had been peering directly into the sun while taking six weeks of radiation treatments for cancer. But something else looked really strange. I leaned into the mirror. Something was wrong with my eyebrows. Normally they were black. But now they were the color of dust or sand. The front part of the hair on my head was also the color of the Sahara Desert and singed to a crisp. When I scrunched my eyebrows together to wonder what had taken place, I saw them drop from my face like snow.
That pretty much did it for me. To this day, I am very timorous around anything that ignites gas. Since the stove, I now light gas appliances as if I am holding a flag pole with a match on the end of it. Recently I was reading how to light the propane gas heater on my trailer. I heard that when propane ignites, it expands twenty seven times its size. So I leaned back in the darkness, shielded my face with my arm, and offered my hand as a sacrifice while holding a blue flame on the end of an electronic lighter with a long end. Even as I did that, I said to myself, “I have a bad feeling about this.” Something must have gone wrong. When I brought the flame up to the hole, a rocket of fire in the shape of a baseball bat backed out of the hole and vaporized the hair off of my right hand and wrist. From now on, Linda is going to have to light the heater on the RV or freeze to death. As Mark Twain used to say, “If a cat sits on a hot stove, he’ll never sit on a hot stove again. In fact, he won’t even sit on a cold stove.”
My mother was a country woman. She was born in early 1906 and raised on a poor, lonely farm in Kentucky that sat atop a ridge that fell off to hollers on either side. There were three rooms in that house. There was no plumbing. There was no gas or electricity for either heat or light. They used oil lanterns and old-fashioned, black wood stoves that were flat on top. Up there sat a bucket or a kettle that heated water or coffee. There was no outhouse outside. By the time I came along when she was almost 40, she was a pretty unconventional woman by modern standards in the 1940’s.
For example, she believed that the windows should be open at night and let in lots of fresh air. Even in the dead of winter. She used to tell me that when she was a girl and woke up in the mornings out on top of that Kentucky ridge, the water in the bucket in the kitchen would be rock hard solid ice. So an open window was no big deal, especially if there were several winter coats piled a foot high on your bed, which is what she used to do to me as a young boy. I would get in the bed, and she would begin her routine of emptying her closet and stacking her entire wardrobe on top of me. To this day, when I go to bed, I long to be buried beneath a avalanche of heavy woolen garments heaped high and deep like plywood.
My mother had two rooms on the second floor in the house in which I was raised. The living room and the kitchen. That was it. She slept in the living room. I slept in the kitchen. The kitchen, besides the refrigerator, the oven, and the dining table, contained a twin bed, a self-contained, antique kitchen baker’s cabinet with a flour bin and sifter (sometimes called a Hoosier cabinet), and a wardrobe with drawers. When I first leaped onto the mattress, the bed was like laying on an ice table. So I would knot up in a ball as Mom began her system of throwing heavy pelts on top of me to hold in the heat while my teeth clacked together like a skeleton. Mom didn’t believe in sheets either. I never heard of a sheet on a bed until I got to college. The coats lay on top of a layer of coarse wool blankets that scratched against me like I was wearing a hair shirt. But as I began to warm, I started to stretch out my spindly legs. The blankets and coats were an insulated barrier like fat on a walrus against the dropping temperatures in the room. It became like a Dutch oven under those coats. I pulled them up over my head with only my nose breathing the cold air from a small hole that kept me from suffocating. I was soon fast asleep and woke up in the morning in the exact same position I last remember being in simply because the lead coats were like an iron press on top of bacon at The Waffle House.
But now came the problem. I had to get up. The temperature could be in the 20’s. I would bolt for the window, shut it, and fire up the gas oven in the kitchen. My mother feared gas like the Ebola virus and continually warned me about the prospect of it blowing up the house. So whenever she went to work while I was at school, or when she left in the morning before I awoke, she always turned off all the stoves, which, of course, were gas. When I came home from school in the afternoon, the house was as cold as a meat freezer, just like it had been during the night. And it remained that way till she came home because I was to never touch the stove in the living room else I blow myself and the coats into the next world.
In the living room was an ancient looking gas stove that required cautious manual stimulation. It stood about three feet high on four short, claw feet and had a drop-down door on the front of it that fell forward when it was opened by a handle. The front of the the stove angled slightly back like the sloping head of an American Indian. The face of the door had sixteen small, translucent, yellowish, mica windows in it that did not burn or break under the tremendous heat the stove threw off. Behind the door and inside the stove sat a bed of pinkish lava donuts that glowed red hot and intensified the stove’s hot breath. From the crown of the stove, a six inch pipe came straight up out of its head, made a 90 degree right angle half way toward the ceiling and then disappeared into the wall of the house and into the chimney that let dangerous fumes escape.
That is the way the stove looked to my mother and everyone else. But that is not the way the stove looked to me. I would come into the cold room and see this thing sitting there with its yellow eyes looking straight forward from its oblong shaped head and standing on its four gnarled, short arms as if it were leaning on its knuckles like a frozen metal mutant. Its silver, multi-eyed face was fastened at attention while a silver arm from the wall came in and put its hand in the top of the stove’s head and locked its gaze straight ahead until its eyes glowed red. In that cold, dark room, that stove looked like a graven image. It never moved. Thank God it never looked at me. It just sat silently, ice-cold, as my active imagination conjured up images of the stove turning turning slightly towards me and staring. I soon had to leave the room.
To my mother, it was A stove, not THE stove. She respected it, but she did not fear it or see it sitting there like an malevolent idol as I did. It was inanimate, merely a device. Nothing more.
So when Mom lit the stove, it was a pretty routine exercise, although it did require care. My mother would crouch down on her knees, push open a large cardboard box filled with matches that rattled when it was shaken, extract a wooden stick with a blue nob and a red tip welded on the end like a cotton swab on the end of a Q-tip, push the box back within itself, and then drag the match across the sandpaper strip on the side. The match would flare to flame as she scratched it across the course belt of emory paper. The near empty box would amplify the sound of the match strike like a small speaker. So far so good. Now came the dangerous part. A narrow pipe protruded out from the bottom and side of the stove. Through this pipe a stream of invisible gas tinged with a sulfur scent blew through a tiny opening and into the stove’s cavernous belly. As she leaned toward the hole with the blue flame working its way toward her fingers, she would turn a stiff knob that opened the deadly hole out of which the good but evil gas would emit. The match was there at the front door waiting for the hissing gas. When the pressure in the pipe pushed the gas through that narrow opening and into the hot arms of the flame, it was like two lovers connecting, and a marriage of ignition exploded inches away inside the stove’s midriff. There was an instantaneous flash inside the stove accompanied by a swoosh that shot blue flames across the burners from scores of little holes underneath those donuts, and heat began to emanate into our house. I don’t ever remember her not practicing that litany of procedure in that order.
But this was a ritual that my mother was always suspicious of because sometimes you would hear of a frame house blowing into a million pieces due to some idiot not being careful around one of these gas heaters. So with every light, my mother would go into Bible themes about sinners being in the hands of an angry God of fire as her trembling fingers came near the gas. Thus, she told me to never touch the stove. There was nothing for her to fear. I would have frozen to death before touching that thing. I loathed the stove’s malignant face. In spite of that, within ten minutes, the hated stove was throwing off wonderful heat as I ventured my backside toward it and let it penetrate my pants to the point of setting them on fire.
All was wonderful. We were warm. Life was good. That is, as long as Mom was lighting the stove. But one day Mom came to me and said she thought I was ready to take the next step. The next step? She said she was going to teach me how to light the stove without blowing up the house, the neighborhood, and the coats. She was probably also getting tired of coming home to a house where we could have hung frozen sides of beef. So one day she took me into the living room where the stove sat looking out at me with those sixteen mustard-shaded eyes. Before she assumed the position of kneeling like a penitent before the sixteen-eyed, silver god that could take our lives if we didn’t perform our ritual to its satisfaction, she waxed eloquent once again with Southern Baptist sermon excerpts about the danger of messing with and not giving The Stove the utmost respect as we fed him with life-giving fire. It was like my Bar Mitzvah. I had now reached the age of accountability and was going to give our heat-giving god his due. As she handed me the matches, we both knelt down as if to pray to The Stove. On this day, I would turn the knob and release the dragon. I had seen that done a thousand times - always, mind you, with a reminder of God’s presence. But turning that knob myself for the first time was like opening the basket lid to a cobra. She told me to select a match from the box. As my hands quivered, I could hear them rattling inside, a portentous sound, as I picked up the container that was the size of a half of a brick. I nominated one for the task as my mother breathed softly beside me and whispered, “Whatever you do, be very careful.” I was scared crapless. As I whisked the tender on the box, it erupted in flame and the others rattled like Eastern Diamondbacks inside. I brought the match low to the cave’s exit where the dragon would come forth. Now the knob. The knob was tight and hard to turn. That seemed fitting and made me grateful. It was like cranking a crusty, heavy door that housed a terrible being. I heard the distinct wheeze of gas issuing out and denoted the sulfurous smell. Instantly, the gas caught the ignition and fired into the stove with the familiar sound of flame rushing through the holes.
From that day on, it was me and The Stove. I lit it often, but I never became comfortable with it. I always approached The Stove, that gas handle, the jangle of those matches, and the end of the gas pipe like I was putting my hand inside a basement electrical box of live circuit breakers while standing in a bathtub of water with bare feet in copper shoes while in complete darkness.
One winter day in high school, I came home on a cold, dark and dreary day. The chill penetrated the house. Mom would be home from work soon. So I wanted the house to be cozy for her when she stepped inside. Once the old stove got going, iciness dissipated before its warm respiration. Its long, warm arms wrapped its recipients in their welcoming embrace. Stand in front of it when those coals got red, and its fingers would swarm up your shirt. The stove was the center of the house and the source of our comfort.
But to get there, the stove had to be transformed from Hyde into Jekyll. It had to be kindled through the turning of that valve that released treacherous, invisible gas that was rendered safe through the timely ignition of a spark or flame. That was the gauntlet that one had to navigate to transition from wintery rawness to homey repose. As I opened the door and stepped lightly into the quiet, dark room where the cold stove sat silently, I looked at its silver-painted face with its sixteen clouded, pale-yellow eyes looking straight ahead through its door. It seemed to kneel over and rest on its knuckles like it was going to spring across the room. Behind those eyes in its hollow body lay a bed of razor-edged lava donuts that would roar its torso into an inferno. There they rested in dormancy waiting for deadly gas-turned-to-flame to sibilate through the vents. Again, out of the top of its head I saw that six inch pipe come straight up and right-angle into the chimney. It looked like a robot connected to the mother ship by some immobile lifeline. As it rested in the dark shadows of Mom’s room, the stove seemed to have some kind of dark personality at this time of day. It had sat in cold sleep all alone since the night before, lifeless and without breath. Cold had slowly penetrated its surface when the life-giving gas was cut off the previous night. It ticked to silence as every molecule of its being came to cold room temperature, leaving it helpless to come to life on its own like “The Thing” frozen in the arctic ice.
I could hear the floor creak below the carpet as I drew near and bent down in my winter coat as if in worship before the stove. I turned the ominous valve and listened for the whistle of the imperceptible, malodorous gas escape into the confines of its belly. I reached for the box of wooden matches that always sat next to and brought to life the idol. I slid the box open and took a wooden stick at the end of which sat that small red and blue blob that sparked to flame when scratched on a rough veneer. All I was doing was correct. I had seen it done a hundred times by my mother. The only problem was - as I looked back on the scene moments later - that the sequence in which this procedure was being done was incorrect. The match should have been struck first and posted up to wait for the gas to excrete from the valve. Instead, the gas was pouring from the pipe, and I was taking precious time getting the match to flare to life. Cherished seconds were allowing gas into the wider room, not just inside the fetish itself.
At last the match came to life. I was a foot and a half away from the pipe as I began to descend toward the stove.
The next impression I had was that it was the Second Coming. There was a loud swoosh and a pop akin to a soft blast, sort of like taking your hand and slamming it into a plastic bag filled with air, followed by a flash of lightning. My face felt like it was on fire. I stood up over the idol whose procedure I had violated as if I had put my hands on the holy Ark of the Covenant. I ran over to the mirror to see what had happened. It was a good thing I had clothes on because the top layer of epidermis on all of my exposed skin had just been peeled, yea, cooked off. I looked as if I had been peering directly into the sun while taking six weeks of radiation treatments for cancer. But something else looked really strange. I leaned into the mirror. Something was wrong with my eyebrows. Normally they were black. But now they were the color of dust or sand. The front part of the hair on my head was also the color of the Sahara Desert and singed to a crisp. When I scrunched my eyebrows together to wonder what had taken place, I saw them drop from my face like snow.
That pretty much did it for me. To this day, I am very timorous around anything that ignites gas. Since the stove, I now light gas appliances as if I am holding a flag pole with a match on the end of it. Recently I was reading how to light the propane gas heater on my trailer. I heard that when propane ignites, it expands twenty seven times its size. So I leaned back in the darkness, shielded my face with my arm, and offered my hand as a sacrifice while holding a blue flame on the end of an electronic lighter with a long end. Even as I did that, I said to myself, “I have a bad feeling about this.” Something must have gone wrong. When I brought the flame up to the hole, a rocket of fire in the shape of a baseball bat backed out of the hole and vaporized the hair off of my right hand and wrist. From now on, Linda is going to have to light the heater on the RV or freeze to death. As Mark Twain used to say, “If a cat sits on a hot stove, he’ll never sit on a hot stove again. In fact, he won’t even sit on a cold stove.”
For example, she believed that the windows should be open at night and let in lots of fresh air. Even in the dead of winter. She used to tell me that when she was a girl and woke up in the mornings out on top of that Kentucky ridge, the water in the bucket in the kitchen would be rock hard solid ice. So an open window was no big deal, especially if there were several winter coats piled a foot high on your bed, which is what she used to do to me as a young boy. I would get in the bed, and she would begin her routine of emptying her closet and stacking her entire wardrobe on top of me. To this day, when I go to bed, I long to be buried beneath a avalanche of heavy woolen garments heaped high and deep like plywood.
My mother had two rooms on the second floor in the house in which I was raised. The living room and the kitchen. That was it. She slept in the living room. I slept in the kitchen. The kitchen, besides the refrigerator, the oven, and the dining table, contained a twin bed, a self-contained, antique kitchen baker’s cabinet with a flour bin and sifter (sometimes called a Hoosier cabinet), and a wardrobe with drawers. When I first leaped onto the mattress, the bed was like laying on an ice table. So I would knot up in a ball as Mom began her system of throwing heavy pelts on top of me to hold in the heat while my teeth clacked together like a skeleton. Mom didn’t believe in sheets either. I never heard of a sheet on a bed until I got to college. The coats lay on top of a layer of coarse wool blankets that scratched against me like I was wearing a hair shirt. But as I began to warm, I started to stretch out my spindly legs. The blankets and coats were an insulated barrier like fat on a walrus against the dropping temperatures in the room. It became like a Dutch oven under those coats. I pulled them up over my head with only my nose breathing the cold air from a small hole that kept me from suffocating. I was soon fast asleep and woke up in the morning in the exact same position I last remember being in simply because the lead coats were like an iron press on top of bacon at The Waffle House.
But now came the problem. I had to get up. The temperature could be in the 20’s. I would bolt for the window, shut it, and fire up the gas oven in the kitchen. My mother feared gas like the Ebola virus and continually warned me about the prospect of it blowing up the house. So whenever she went to work while I was at school, or when she left in the morning before I awoke, she always turned off all the stoves, which, of course, were gas. When I came home from school in the afternoon, the house was as cold as a meat freezer, just like it had been during the night. And it remained that way till she came home because I was to never touch the stove in the living room else I blow myself and the coats into the next world.
In the living room was an ancient looking gas stove that required cautious manual stimulation. It stood about three feet high on four short, claw feet and had a drop-down door on the front of it that fell forward when it was opened by a handle. The front of the the stove angled slightly back like the sloping head of an American Indian. The face of the door had sixteen small, translucent, yellowish, mica windows in it that did not burn or break under the tremendous heat the stove threw off. Behind the door and inside the stove sat a bed of pinkish lava donuts that glowed red hot and intensified the stove’s hot breath. From the crown of the stove, a six inch pipe came straight up out of its head, made a 90 degree right angle half way toward the ceiling and then disappeared into the wall of the house and into the chimney that let dangerous fumes escape.
That is the way the stove looked to my mother and everyone else. But that is not the way the stove looked to me. I would come into the cold room and see this thing sitting there with its yellow eyes looking straight forward from its oblong shaped head and standing on its four gnarled, short arms as if it were leaning on its knuckles like a frozen metal mutant. Its silver, multi-eyed face was fastened at attention while a silver arm from the wall came in and put its hand in the top of the stove’s head and locked its gaze straight ahead until its eyes glowed red. In that cold, dark room, that stove looked like a graven image. It never moved. Thank God it never looked at me. It just sat silently, ice-cold, as my active imagination conjured up images of the stove turning turning slightly towards me and staring. I soon had to leave the room.
To my mother, it was A stove, not THE stove. She respected it, but she did not fear it or see it sitting there like an malevolent idol as I did. It was inanimate, merely a device. Nothing more.
So when Mom lit the stove, it was a pretty routine exercise, although it did require care. My mother would crouch down on her knees, push open a large cardboard box filled with matches that rattled when it was shaken, extract a wooden stick with a blue nob and a red tip welded on the end like a cotton swab on the end of a Q-tip, push the box back within itself, and then drag the match across the sandpaper strip on the side. The match would flare to flame as she scratched it across the course belt of emory paper. The near empty box would amplify the sound of the match strike like a small speaker. So far so good. Now came the dangerous part. A narrow pipe protruded out from the bottom and side of the stove. Through this pipe a stream of invisible gas tinged with a sulfur scent blew through a tiny opening and into the stove’s cavernous belly. As she leaned toward the hole with the blue flame working its way toward her fingers, she would turn a stiff knob that opened the deadly hole out of which the good but evil gas would emit. The match was there at the front door waiting for the hissing gas. When the pressure in the pipe pushed the gas through that narrow opening and into the hot arms of the flame, it was like two lovers connecting, and a marriage of ignition exploded inches away inside the stove’s midriff. There was an instantaneous flash inside the stove accompanied by a swoosh that shot blue flames across the burners from scores of little holes underneath those donuts, and heat began to emanate into our house. I don’t ever remember her not practicing that litany of procedure in that order.
But this was a ritual that my mother was always suspicious of because sometimes you would hear of a frame house blowing into a million pieces due to some idiot not being careful around one of these gas heaters. So with every light, my mother would go into Bible themes about sinners being in the hands of an angry God of fire as her trembling fingers came near the gas. Thus, she told me to never touch the stove. There was nothing for her to fear. I would have frozen to death before touching that thing. I loathed the stove’s malignant face. In spite of that, within ten minutes, the hated stove was throwing off wonderful heat as I ventured my backside toward it and let it penetrate my pants to the point of setting them on fire.
All was wonderful. We were warm. Life was good. That is, as long as Mom was lighting the stove. But one day Mom came to me and said she thought I was ready to take the next step. The next step? She said she was going to teach me how to light the stove without blowing up the house, the neighborhood, and the coats. She was probably also getting tired of coming home to a house where we could have hung frozen sides of beef. So one day she took me into the living room where the stove sat looking out at me with those sixteen mustard-shaded eyes. Before she assumed the position of kneeling like a penitent before the sixteen-eyed, silver god that could take our lives if we didn’t perform our ritual to its satisfaction, she waxed eloquent once again with Southern Baptist sermon excerpts about the danger of messing with and not giving The Stove the utmost respect as we fed him with life-giving fire. It was like my Bar Mitzvah. I had now reached the age of accountability and was going to give our heat-giving god his due. As she handed me the matches, we both knelt down as if to pray to The Stove. On this day, I would turn the knob and release the dragon. I had seen that done a thousand times - always, mind you, with a reminder of God’s presence. But turning that knob myself for the first time was like opening the basket lid to a cobra. She told me to select a match from the box. As my hands quivered, I could hear them rattling inside, a portentous sound, as I picked up the container that was the size of a half of a brick. I nominated one for the task as my mother breathed softly beside me and whispered, “Whatever you do, be very careful.” I was scared crapless. As I whisked the tender on the box, it erupted in flame and the others rattled like Eastern Diamondbacks inside. I brought the match low to the cave’s exit where the dragon would come forth. Now the knob. The knob was tight and hard to turn. That seemed fitting and made me grateful. It was like cranking a crusty, heavy door that housed a terrible being. I heard the distinct wheeze of gas issuing out and denoted the sulfurous smell. Instantly, the gas caught the ignition and fired into the stove with the familiar sound of flame rushing through the holes.
From that day on, it was me and The Stove. I lit it often, but I never became comfortable with it. I always approached The Stove, that gas handle, the jangle of those matches, and the end of the gas pipe like I was putting my hand inside a basement electrical box of live circuit breakers while standing in a bathtub of water with bare feet in copper shoes while in complete darkness.
One winter day in high school, I came home on a cold, dark and dreary day. The chill penetrated the house. Mom would be home from work soon. So I wanted the house to be cozy for her when she stepped inside. Once the old stove got going, iciness dissipated before its warm respiration. Its long, warm arms wrapped its recipients in their welcoming embrace. Stand in front of it when those coals got red, and its fingers would swarm up your shirt. The stove was the center of the house and the source of our comfort.
But to get there, the stove had to be transformed from Hyde into Jekyll. It had to be kindled through the turning of that valve that released treacherous, invisible gas that was rendered safe through the timely ignition of a spark or flame. That was the gauntlet that one had to navigate to transition from wintery rawness to homey repose. As I opened the door and stepped lightly into the quiet, dark room where the cold stove sat silently, I looked at its silver-painted face with its sixteen clouded, pale-yellow eyes looking straight ahead through its door. It seemed to kneel over and rest on its knuckles like it was going to spring across the room. Behind those eyes in its hollow body lay a bed of razor-edged lava donuts that would roar its torso into an inferno. There they rested in dormancy waiting for deadly gas-turned-to-flame to sibilate through the vents. Again, out of the top of its head I saw that six inch pipe come straight up and right-angle into the chimney. It looked like a robot connected to the mother ship by some immobile lifeline. As it rested in the dark shadows of Mom’s room, the stove seemed to have some kind of dark personality at this time of day. It had sat in cold sleep all alone since the night before, lifeless and without breath. Cold had slowly penetrated its surface when the life-giving gas was cut off the previous night. It ticked to silence as every molecule of its being came to cold room temperature, leaving it helpless to come to life on its own like “The Thing” frozen in the arctic ice.
I could hear the floor creak below the carpet as I drew near and bent down in my winter coat as if in worship before the stove. I turned the ominous valve and listened for the whistle of the imperceptible, malodorous gas escape into the confines of its belly. I reached for the box of wooden matches that always sat next to and brought to life the idol. I slid the box open and took a wooden stick at the end of which sat that small red and blue blob that sparked to flame when scratched on a rough veneer. All I was doing was correct. I had seen it done a hundred times by my mother. The only problem was - as I looked back on the scene moments later - that the sequence in which this procedure was being done was incorrect. The match should have been struck first and posted up to wait for the gas to excrete from the valve. Instead, the gas was pouring from the pipe, and I was taking precious time getting the match to flare to life. Cherished seconds were allowing gas into the wider room, not just inside the fetish itself.
At last the match came to life. I was a foot and a half away from the pipe as I began to descend toward the stove.
The next impression I had was that it was the Second Coming. There was a loud swoosh and a pop akin to a soft blast, sort of like taking your hand and slamming it into a plastic bag filled with air, followed by a flash of lightning. My face felt like it was on fire. I stood up over the idol whose procedure I had violated as if I had put my hands on the holy Ark of the Covenant. I ran over to the mirror to see what had happened. It was a good thing I had clothes on because the top layer of epidermis on all of my exposed skin had just been peeled, yea, cooked off. I looked as if I had been peering directly into the sun while taking six weeks of radiation treatments for cancer. But something else looked really strange. I leaned into the mirror. Something was wrong with my eyebrows. Normally they were black. But now they were the color of dust or sand. The front part of the hair on my head was also the color of the Sahara Desert and singed to a crisp. When I scrunched my eyebrows together to wonder what had taken place, I saw them drop from my face like snow.
That pretty much did it for me. To this day, I am very timorous around anything that ignites gas. Since the stove, I now light gas appliances as if I am holding a flag pole with a match on the end of it. Recently I was reading how to light the propane gas heater on my trailer. I heard that when propane ignites, it expands twenty seven times its size. So I leaned back in the darkness, shielded my face with my arm, and offered my hand as a sacrifice while holding a blue flame on the end of an electronic lighter with a long end. Even as I did that, I said to myself, “I have a bad feeling about this.” Something must have gone wrong. When I brought the flame up to the hole, a rocket of fire in the shape of a baseball bat backed out of the hole and vaporized the hair off of my right hand and wrist. From now on, Linda is going to have to light the heater on the RV or freeze to death. As Mark Twain used to say, “If a cat sits on a hot stove, he’ll never sit on a hot stove again. In fact, he won’t even sit on a cold stove.”