A Mind-Boggling Holiday (or Why Parker Brothers Products Should Have More Comprehensive Warning Labels)

It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and I am 12 years old. We have a couple of not-terribly-distant relatives in town for the holiday, and my mother is planning a feast. Today, however, she decides to make a simple meal of burgers and homemade fries. She breaks out the oil-fryer and goes to work making dinner.

Meanwhile, I have decided to play a board game with my rarely-in-town cousin. We settle on Boggle, which has the benefit of being both studiously quiet (during play) and uproariously loud (during the shake-up of letter die). We set up on the floor in the living room, which is attached openly to the kitchen, where Mama Meldraw is making dinner. My mother has an undiagnosed addiction to word games, and so when she hears the deafening tumble of letter die, followed by exclamations of “I don’t know how anyone finds any words with these letters!” she is drawn to it like an Olsen twin to a bathroom stall.

Mama Meldraw begins by simply peering over our shoulders during play, nonchalantly trying to point out words to her children. Soon she is on all fours, scribbling madly onto her own score sheet, now thoroughly involved in the game. She is winning, of course.

I look up during a particularly intense period of word-finding silence, and it is brought to my immediate attention that the oil in the fryer has caught fire, having been left unattended and gotten too hot.

“Mom!”

“Shh. We have ten seconds left.”

“Your kitchen is on fire.”

With surprising speed, Mama Meldraw springs to her feet and tries to remove the pan from the hot burner, which currently has smallish flames licking the lid of the pan. As she tries to move the pan to a cooler burner, the jostling of the oil causes it to ignite further, and she has to place it back down…very, very quickly. Now the pan is engulfed in large-ish flames.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are on our feet and starting to panic. My father is not home from work yet, so my sister and I turn to the only authority figure in the room that is not waving oven mitts around like a very strange air traffic controller: my cousin. He warns us not to pour water over the thing, and thinks he may have heard something about using salt to put out grease fires. My mother hilariously empties a very small salt shaker onto the lidded pot, to no avail.

My cousin has suddenly unearthed our ancient fire extinguisher and looks rather the hero as he tells my mother to step back. He takes aim with the extinguisher and dramatically pulls the lever, or the trigger, or whatever one pulls to make use of a fire extinguisher. Nothing happens. It would appear that the fire extinguisher has dried up, or expired, or ruptured, or evaporated, because it is older than I am.

At this point, I am convinced our house is burning down, and I am desperate to find my cats. My mother is yelling at us to all go out onto the front lawn, because the fire seems to be growing. I call the cats’ names over and over again, finally find one of them, grab her by the scruff, and am forced to run out the door as the fire department is called.

Suddenly, at the top of the stairs appears my 78-year old grandmother, whom everyone had forgotten was upstairs. She had been reading a book and looked up to find her room a little smoky, and wandered out to see what the commotion was. We holler at her to get herself outside before the house burns down and we all die, and she does so, though she will never, ever let us forget about the time we almost let her die while we tried to save our damn cats.

Once the lot of us are standing outside on our lawn, clutching at least one terrified feline, the fire trucks roll up and suited men with large hats go about trying to rescue our French fries. They easily extinguish the fire with some significant damage to the kitchen, but no structural harm. While we stand on our lawn, bathed in flashing lights and the curious looks of far too many neighbors, my father arrives home with impeccable timing. The sight that greets him makes him think seriously about turning around and checking that he’s on the right street.

And that, kids, is why Boggle is a fire hazard.