A Tale as old as Cavemen

I caught fire a couple of times in the past week or so. It’s an odd feeling to look at your arm and say, “oh my, I’m on fire.”

I really should get a new coat. The coat is what caught on fire and the main reason why I’m not in intensive care getting skin grafts.

On the other hand, if I didn’t have the coat on, I wouldn’t have caught on fire in the first place.

I’ve been burned myself repeatedly over the years. Not on purpose, mind you.

But if you like to cook, and I do, you will inevitably suffer from burns. The last memorable one was when I waved my arm accidentally over the electric teakettle.

The steam absolutely scorched my arm before I ever knew it.

I worked in restaurants as a line cook for years in my younger days and you’d burn yourself so often that you’d end up with “asbestos hands,” which is to say you could pretty much grab a sheet pan out of an oven, at least for a few seconds, before it really started to hurt.

The most gruesome story I ever saw was a fellow cook who was changing out the hood fan screens above a hot deep fat fryer.

The fryer had a lid on it, but the lid slipped and his foot went into the hot oil.

He took a very fast trip to the hospital.

There was also a fella named Dave who dropped one of those industrial-sized rolls of plastic wrap.

Dave made the mistake of catching it in mid-air and the cutting edge slit his wrists open.

He went to the hospital, too.

I think there’s a Chinese proverb that says, “never catch a falling knife.” Dave didn’t read or hear that one. He wasn’t much a of a reader. He was one of those guys that was lovably dumb.

But I digress.

Like I said, my coat is the reason why I caught on fire. It’s an old Carhartt and I’ve waxed poetic about it before.

But it really is starting to fall apart. The sleeves are all ragged and one of the ragged strips caught very much on fire when I was putting firewood in the woodstove the other day.

I looked at my arm with flames licking up my elbow and just sort of squished it out.

The second time I had a wood fire going in a barbecue grill, so I could dump the hot coals into the pit in my backyard to cook a pig roast.

The coat caught on fire again. It burned for awhile before I noticed it taking the hair off my wrist.

Squished that one out, too.

And the pig?

It was smoky, and delicious.