My interactions with recreational fireworks as a kid were nearly disastrous

I don't know if kids still do this, but when I was growing up, my friends and I would play with fireworks any and every chance we got.

By "fireworks," I mean not only things that make loud noises, but also relatively innocent stuff like black snakes, smoke bombs, pop-its, and jumping jacks. If you could light it or throw it, and it did something cool, we were all over it.

In general, we were all over anything involving fire. I don't know what drove us to be such little pyromaniacs, but we loved us some flames.

The problem was, at least as far as I was concerned, the potential for injury was real and frequent. I never actually got hurt playing with fireworks, but that was only by the grace of God.

I remember once being with my friend Matt, who had gotten his hands on an M-80. These little bombs were the kings of neighborhood fireworks simply because of the explosive power and noise they generated. We couldn't have been more than 10 years old, yet here we were playing with something that could have blown our fingers off.

We decided to wedge the M-80 into a little crack in a picnic table at the playground. Matt lit it and we backed up a few feet. When it went off, splinters of wood flew in almost every direction, with one whizzing within an inch or two of my head. It could easily have gone into my eye.

Then there was the time Matt and Kevin were shooting bottle rockets across the street. I opened the front door to our house to see what was going on, and they very smartly decided to shoot one straight at me. I didn't get hit, but it did enter our house before exploding just inside the storm door.

I almost got in big trouble for that one.

My worst near-miss, without a doubt, was the time I nearly burned down my school with a jumping jack.

I've told this story here on the blog before. Here's how I described the incident in a post 10 years ago:

I was playing with a pack of jumping jacks I'd, um, borrowed from my dad. I was with my nephew Mark, who had to have been only 6 or 7 years old at the time. We were by the old Mapledale Elementary School, and ringing the building was a two-foot-high pile of dry leaves. My genius idea was to light a jumping jack and throw it into these leaves, so that's what I did. The leaves, of course, immediately caught fire, and the flames started spreading rapidly around the perimeter of the building. Mark and I ran away as fast as we could. Someone who was there told the cops I had done it, and by the time I got home, there was a Wickliffe police cruiser waiting in the driveway for me. My mother was, to put it mildly, not happy.

You'll want to know what I was thinking there. Heck, I want to know what I was thinking, but I don't know. Not even an 11-year-old boy can fathom the thought processes of an 11-year-old boy.

The only positive outcome was that the school did not, in fact, burn down. But that's only because the good folks from the Wickliffe Fire Department came and put out the mini inferno I had started.

Anyway, it's Fourth of July here in America, which means recreational fireworks will be out in abundance. If you celebrate in this manner, please stay safe and use a little common sense.

Like, for instance, make sure that when an M-80 explodes, it doesn't create projectiles that could potentially kill you and your friends.

That would really put a damper on the holiday.

Stupid boy stuff my friends and I used to do when we were much younger

I'm not saying girls don't do anything of this, but I am saying that most of the girls I knew when I was, say, 12 years old were far too smart to spend their time engaged in the types of idiotic activities that occupied the boys with whom I hung out. To wit:

Play inside empty train cabooses
It's not like this was really dangerous or anything, but it most definitely was illegal. And somehow we never got caught/arrested. The train crews always seemed to leave the cabooses unlocked, so we would go in there and just hang out. And we also stole some flares, which itself I guess was also illegal. This is not something I have to worry about my own sons doing because trains don't even have cabooses anymore.

Throw firecrackers into dry leaves
Actually, I'm the only one in my circle of friends I ever remember doing this. I was playing with a pack of Jumping Jacks I'd, um, borrowed from my dad. I was with my nephew Mark, who had to have been only 6 or 7 years old at the time. We were by the old Mapledale Elementary School, and ringing the building was a two-foot-high pile of dry leaves. My genius idea was to light a Jumping Jack and throw it into these leaves, so that's what I did. The leaves, of course, immediately caught fire, and the flames started spreading rapidly around the perimeter of the building. Mark and I of course ran away as fast as we could. Someone who was there told the cops I had done it, and by the time I got home, there was a Wickliffe police cruiser waiting in the driveway for me. My mother was, to put it mildly, not happy.

Take small rafts out onto Lake Erie
Geez, seriously, I'm not even sure what we were thinking here. We had this little one-man (actually, it was more like a half-man) raft that we used to paddle out several hundred yards into Lake Erie. That's Lake Erie, a shallow Great Lake with a reputation for nasty undercurrents. And I was never a very good swimmer. I should have died at least a half-dozen times doing this. Don't try telling me there's no God.

Ding-Dong Ditch
This is an activity with which you're probably familiar. You knock on a door or ring a doorbell and run away before the occupant of the house can come to the door. And...that's pretty much it. Except we didn't call it Ding-Dong Ditch, as it's known in some parts of the country. We called it something extremely racially offensive that I won't even type here. The point is, we did this and it was stupid. And looking back, I want to smack my younger self for it.

Riding our bikes over homemade ramps
A lot of guys did this and most turned out just fine. I tried it once. Only once. Because when I did it, I took the ramp at full speed and was launched over the handlebars of my bike, landing hard on the concrete sidewalk and knocking the wind out of myself for the first and only time in my life. Couldn't breathe for a solid 10-15 seconds. It was scary. I left my bike there and staggered across the street to my house, where I collapsed onto the living room couch and proceeded to bleed profusely for the next half hour while my mom bandaged me up.

Climb onto the roof of the school
This was mostly harmless, I suppose, if you ignore the risk of falling off and fracturing our skulls. But it also led to the other time the police showed up at my house. A friend and I were on top of Mapledale not really doing anything. Just, again, hanging out. But a group of girls saw us and told someone, and that someone felt the need to call the cops. And...well, once again, my mother took a dim view of the proceedings.

Throw rocks at each other
Again, why? We used to whip rocks at each other all the time. In any given summer day, you could expect to have at least 1-2 rocks thrown at your head. And that was considered normal. One time we were down at the same (private/no trespassing) beach from which we used to take those rafts out onto the lake and we were, of course, flinging rocks at each other. My friend Matt jumped into the air to avoid one of my volleys, and all that did was make it so the rock hit him in the shin instead of the stomach. It opened up a big cut. Matt bled everywhere. We took him to a nearby drug store and were given a few band-aids to cover up the wound. I think he ended up needing stitches. And I'm not lying when I say it was one of the proudest moments of my life. What a great throw that was.

Go into the woods and light fires and swing hatchets
Yeah, back to the fire again. We were little pyromaniacs. But when we went into Douglas Woods, a several-acre patch of trees and dirt trails near our houses, we also added sharp landscaping implements to the mix. Which we did occasionally throw at each other, but not nearly as often as the rocks. Seriously, they should have just euthanized the lot of us.

Play "Tetanus"
OK, last one. My friend Todd and I would play a game in his basement that we dubbed "Tetanus." He would throw darts at my feet and I would try to get out of the way of them. That was it. That was the whole game. And I escaped almost every time. A few darts hit me, but only one ever actually went through my sock and drew blood. And for the record, I never came down with tetanus. I win.