70 Candles

Before I can tell you about the parachute, I should explain just a bit about the bedroom my brother, Dave, and I shared. The house on Yerby Street did not have central heating. It was an old house, and several rooms had small gas space heaters. During the winter, those heaters were hot and kept the house warm. Our bedroom was at the back of the house, with a door that opened onto the back porch. The two boys could quickly reach the backyard in an emergency, like if a dog wandered into the yard.

Dave and I were maybe about eight years old on this fateful day. It was winter, and our parents had purchased parachutes for us. Of course, these weren’t actual parachutes. Instead, we got little green plastic soldiers attached to camouflage plastic parachutes by thin strings. We immediately deployed those paratroopers outside, where they made repeated jumps into the “Battle of the Backyard.” After supper that night, we naturally wanted to continue the epic battle these two soldiers had been fighting. That is where things got interesting. We went to our bedroom and arranged the pillows on our bed to provide an appropriate mountain range. We then crouched beside the bed to throw the little green soldiers up over the mountain range and float down to fight battles on the other side.

I mentioned our house had small space heaters. Because our bedroom was at the back end of the house, it was often chilly during the winter. So, Dad would come in and light our little heater in the evenings and leave it on overnight for us. Our space heater was a small white steel box in one corner of the bedroom. It was only a couple feet high and wide. That fateful night of the massive “Battle of the Pillow Mountain,” the space heater was hot.

Dave and I had thrown our little green soldiers over the pillow mountain at one point, but one was caught in a hitherto unknown ill wind. One of those parachutes floated directly over the space heater and slowly descended. We watched it in fascination. Then, it hit that heater. It took less than a second for that thin plastic parachute to melt over the top of our heater. The little green soldier didn’t fare much better. The smell of melting plastic quickly wafted through our house, and Mom and Dad came running from the front to our bedroom to see what was happening. It didn’t take long for them to notice our white space heater was now camouflaged, with an oddly shaped green lump in the middle.

They opened the outside door to our bedroom to let the stench air out, but nothing else could be done. The little green army man was dead, and the space heater would forever bear a camouflage wrap.