It
all began on the evening of Dec. 25, 2006. Our five children were in their
prime Santa years: Abby, the oldest, was only 9, and the youngest, Jamie, was a
mere 18 months. We’d spent the day playing and eating and napping and ignoring
the accretion of Christmas detritus left in the wake of all the opened
presents. But after the sun went down, it was left to Dad to clean up the mess.
So I
burned most of it.
It
seemed like the right thing to do at the time. A cheery Christmas demands a
roaring fire in the hearth, and a roaring fire in the hearth demands stuff that
burns, whether it’s wood or cardboard or the ugly red wrapping paper with the
creepy-looking elves on it. Thus, festivity and necessity combined, and the
pile of spent trimmings was transformed into ash within minutes.
That’s
where the problem really began.
Ash,
it turns out, is hot. That’s why my plastic garbage bins have warnings on them
that say, “Do not throw hot ash into here.” That seems like common sense, so
you would think I would have paid attention to those warnings as I shoveled all
the ash into the bins, which I left next to our garage outside.
Hindsight
is always 20/20.
I
wasn’t thinking about any of this as we crawled into bed and fell straight to
sleep. And I still wasn’t thinking about it several hours later when we awoke
to the sound of our toddler screaming like a banshee.
By
this point, Jamie had been sleeping through the night consistently for several
months. We had thought late-night emergencies were behind us, but that
Christmas night the kid had been awakened by a scatological disaster that
cannot be described in detail with good taste or decency. Suffice it to say
that his diaper had proved inadequate.
In
technical terms, this was what most parents refer to as a “blowout.”
Still,
after five kids, though, blowouts really aren’t that big a deal. I cleaned it
all up, and I went to get rid of the diaper. Ordinarily, I would have just
tossed the thing into the garage and then taken it to the outside bins the next
morning. But this thing didn’t just need to be thrown out; it needed to be
disarmed. So I took it all the way out to the garbage bins …
Which
were, of course, on fire.
As I
buried the flames in snow, I realized that this stinky diaper had probably
saved all of our lives. If Jamie hadn’t woken up, and if he hadn’t produced a
WMD that required secure disposal, we would never have known about the fire,
and the results may well have been tragic.
My
brother-in-law, an electrician, came by the next day and pointed out that one
bin had melted all the way to the ground, but along the way, it had set fire to
the base of the one next to it. He said it was moments away from producing a
spurt of flame that would likely have ignited all the drywall in my garage and
burned down the house within minutes.
But
it didn’t. We were saved. And I consider it a miracle.
I've
even written a song about it called "The Miracle of the Christmas
Poo." I can safely say it’s one of the best songs I've ever recorded.
Merry
Christmas and a happy New Year.
~ Jim Bennett is a recovering actor, theater producer and politico, and he writes about pop culture and politics
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