The Sordid, Easily-Solved Mystery of the Flaming Pinecones

Driving home from work on a Friday afternoon in Atlanta is always hellish. When I drove into our carport, I was exhausted.

To the right of the carport, on the yard, a feet away from our grill, I noticed two small flaming pinecones.  The weeds around them were also on fire.  Since Dekalb County is now a federally designated flood disaster area, the yard is rather waterlogged, and the flaming areas struck me as extremely unnatural.

My first thought was, "Am I hallucinating?" My second thought was, "what the f*%#ing f#$%!" My third thought was "Is this some weird, miniature woodland elf version of the KKK burning crosses?" My fourth thought was, "the kids must have done this." My fifth thought was, "Is my husband criminally negligent enough to have started this with the kids as some kind of science project?" I was almost totally sure the answer to the last question was "No," but it still crossed my mind.

I yelled for Guy. Then J and Sunny came running around the corner from where they must have been hiding. J was dancing around the pinecones and crying.  "I did a bad thing! Please don't tell my mom! Sunny made me do it!" His shoelaces were getting pretty close to the flaming pinecones, and I yelled at him to move away. Then I put out the fires using a thick, wet doormat.

J is a good kid. He's 10 years old and usually mature for his age.  When Sunny gets frustrated, J often gives him lectures about controlling his temper. His family is strict with him. They're very religious, and his mother is some kind of Baptist deacon. We don't have that much in common with them, unlike our other across-the-street neighbors, but we get along nicely, since our kids are such good friends.

Usually J is a good influence on Sunny. He's calmer than Sunny, and he's older and bigger, so Sunny can't really boss him around. But like Sunny, he's often too smart for his own good. When he sets his mind on doing a bad thing, he carries it out. Now I've discovered that when both of them decide to do bad things, they turn into some kind of freaking supervillain team.

Here's what happened. They were playing inside for a while, but since the weather is nice, Guy told them they had to go play outside. His usual rule, which I agree with, is that unless the weather is nasty, kids should be playing outside before dinner. There were a lot of mosquitoes outside. Instead of dealing with the problem by using the readily available mosquito spray, one of them -- we're not sure which, and we don't really care anymore -- had the bright idea of starting a fire to keep away the mosquitoes. The first thing they did was to douse the pinecones with the lighter fluid next to the grill. Then J asked Sunny where the lighter was. They snuck into the house quietly and Sunny got the lighter from the drawer. Then Sunny gave it to J, then J set the pinecones on fire.

At first, Sunny was screaming that it wasn't his idea, that J did it everything on his own.  Contradictions soon appeared in his version of events, and I told Sunny I didn't believe him. But J wasn't telling the truth either. A 7-year-old "made me do it"... ahem... maybe he was confusing Sunny with, I don't know, SATAN?

Guy took J across the street to face the music with his mother. Sunny started to have a meltdown, so I had to take him inside the house and hold him down for a couple minutes. He screamed and cursed at me but it only took a minute until he became remorseful, began crying and admitted everything. He was sorry for lying, he was acting like an idiot, he always made mistakes... at this point I reminded him he wasn't an idiot, everyone makes mistake and the important thing was to learn from those mistakes. He got a light consequence: grounding from outside play and from TV for the rest of the day. We also told him all the things that could have happened as a result: he could have burned the house down, he could have burned his face off and gone to the hospital, he could have burned to death, he could have burned his friend and felt guilty for the rest of his life, and so on.

As we were eating dinner later this night, Sunny said he had a stomachache.  He barely ate half of his dinner. Sunny usually eats like a horse; I always give him a regular adult-sized portion. Guy put two and two together, made the accusation, and Sunny admitted it... before they snuck into the kitchen to get the lighter, they had also used a step stool to steal from the candy bag in the high cupboard, then gorged themselves on Laffy Taffy.

Before this, Sunny was allowed to have one candy every night from the candy bag as long as he ate all his dinner. The consequence for the theft is pretty simple: we're giving away the candy bag tomorrow. He was really upset about that and spent a few minutes crying for his lost candy.

Honestly, we have to laugh a bit at this whole episode now that the drama has died down. It's like they went on a crime spree.

Guy does think Sunny got off too easily for this. We know that whatever J is facing is going to be much worse. He's probably going to get grounded for a week. I'll check with his mother again tomorrow... I also want to reassure her we're going to keep the lighters and lighter fluid locked up from now on.

I think I'm also going to print out a few clinical pictures of burn victims to show Sunny. But other than that, we're not going to give him any more consequences. He's already remorseful. I'm disappointed in J and Sunny, and I have to revise my estimate of their maturity downwards... but I'm hoping that we've nipped this in the bud.