the day the bubble burst
(part three)

It's important for the story that you understand something about Pittsburgh. For some reason, every house older than fifty years is built on the side of a cliff. From the alley behind my house to the sidewalk in front of it are fifty-two stairs. My yard is pretty steep.

The grass hadn't been cut since the previous Autumn, and it had grown a lot since then. The lawnmower huffed and puffed and billowed white smoke as I wrestled it up and down the hill. I had borrowed this particular implement from my neighbor, on the condition that I mow his lawn too. His grass was just as high and just as thick.

Every so often, the lawnmower would shudder to a pitiful halt and belch more smoke into the clear spring day. I figured it was just tough going. I didn't figure it was about to catch fire.

At about this point, the lawnmower caught fire.

By the time I wised up to the fact that I was pushing a burning lawnmower around the property, the flames were pretty high. I tried (yes, I did) extinguishing the flame by bending over the unit and blowing on it like it was a birthday cake. When this plan failed, I was out of ideas.

That's not strictly true. The ideas that did occur to me, however, were more like visualizations of the gas tank exploding and shooting hot shards of steel into my skin, or a huge flame bursting out across the afternoon sky and catching the whole neighborhood ablaze.

I judiciously ran for cover. Ok. I cowered behind my car and peered at the burning lawn implement and tried to devise a new plan.

By this time, a crowd had begun to form.

Mrs, Phillips, God bless her, was on the phone with the fire department. Now our house is less than a mile from the firehouse, but somehow the directions she gave the operator didn't bring them by any direct route. I heard the siren approaching from a long way off, and then listened to it's wail getting fainter and fainter as it travelled the route known only to it and to my dear wife.

I was still cowering behind the car, trying to figure out what kind of contraption I might use to extinguish a fire when the police miraculously arrived with a fire extinguisher. Ah yes, just the right kind of apparatus. I wondered why that hadn't occurred to me.

By the time Pittsburgh's finest had put out the blaze, the fire truck screamed up the alley and eight, count-em eight, firemen arrived in full rubber suits, carrying axes and converged on the smouldering machine. They looked like a football team huddling: eight firemen, two police officers, and half a dozen neighbors bent over a smoking lawnmower.

I looked into the house and saw Mrs. Phillips crouched at the window, peering out from the corner.

"It's all right, hon. The cops put out the fire," I told her.

"I know," she said, still crouching and hiding.

"Well, what's the problem, then?" I asked.

"I'm just waiting for Sky Copter 4 to show up!"

That night in a parallel universe, WTAE TV's 11 O'Clock news featured a story about a sunburned, jobless, shirtless yahoo who caught his neighborhood on fire. There was shaky video shot from the newscaster of me running across the lawn on fire. Underneath my picture was the legend, "Local Idiot" and the voiceover went something like this:

"A Pittsburgh man was badly humiliated in front of just about everybody he knows tonight. Sheldon Ingram has more on this fast-breaking story..."