Celebrating Failure

Description

It was a virus spring day in 1957, a Saturday as I review. My closest companion, Edgar

Hoffman and I were playing with matches, as small kids some of the time do. We

were in the storm cellar of a farm home being built in our Milwaukee

neighborhood. Since it was an end of the week, the work team was not on the site,

leaving Edgar and me allowed to wander about the new home development.

Edgar and I had each developed our own private fortress inside the mostly manufactured

structure. Edgar had quite recently dedicated the corporate sin of overstating his list of qualifications

by announcing he had a warm fire thundering inside his fortification. I accepting that as a test.

(I was freezing my butt off, and I was consistently the serious one.) So that

morning, in the stronghold, what little testosterone I had dominated, and I set out to

construct a greater fire than Edgar’s. Our strongholds were made of straw so it didn’t take

long for me to set off a significant house fire.

Fire engines are frightening when you’re a young man—particularly on the off chance that you know you

are the criminal liable for torching the harsh development around

another person’s home.