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June 20, 2004 To borrow a phrase from Neil Diamond, “It was a hot August night.” Yes, it was a hot August night in 1978 when I was suspected of arson. I had just turned 17 and was preparing to enter my last year of high school. This was the last night of the summer of summers, my final summer as a high school student before I graduated to the real world of becoming a University student and having to work every summer, day and night, to afford a University text book. So being suspected of setting fire to our local strip mall was not exactly how I had intended to spend that last summer evening of carefree youth. It all started innocently enough. I was sitting at home when my best friend called around nine o’clock in the evening. “Hey, why don’t we go out for a walk on the parkway and reminisce about all the good times we’ve had,” was what my friend said. “Sure, let’s do that,” was my quick reply. So we met up and went down to walk along the parkway near our neighbourhood. We were strolling along, enjoying the fresh night air of a waning summer, reminiscing about what we would surely refer to as the “best days of our lives,” to borrow a phrase from Bryan Adams, in our elder years. We talked about “Old Pud,” the giant catfish in our local fishin’ hole, the one that has eluded capture for nigh on 20 years, that we nearly caught earlier that summer. We remembered the smiles on the children’s faces to whom we read stories to on Saturday mornings as part of the library youth volunteer program. We recalled how we nearly got the seats of our pants gored by Butch the Bull while cutting through Farmer Greely’s west 40 on our way to jump off the East Tuckshaw bridge into Gathering Pond for a swim after a hard mornings chores. We relived our adventures on the train track, nearly getting caught on Overpass Bridge by an unexpected freight, as we looked for the rumoured dead body off the side of the tracks. Oh, wait a minute, that last one was the movie, “Stand By Me.” I’ve got to stop mixing up my real life with movies and songs. Anyway, who am I kidding? We didn’t talk about any of those things, let alone actually do them. No, what we talked about was which girls in our senior year would be the least likely to flat-out reject us if we invited them out to the movies. So there we were, two buds strolling along the parkway talking about girls. As we approached the back of our local strip mall, our attention was caught by a ferocious “whhuuumphhh,” which is the universally recognized spelling for the sound a fire makes when it erupts out the backside of one of the stores in the local mall. Stunned, our first thought was, “cool.” Our second thought was that we should call the fire department. So we ran around from behind the local mall and scaled the chain link fence that separated the parking lot from the parkway. Just as we were at the top of the fence, a car with its high beams on flooded us with light; two men in suits jumped out, grabbed us off the fence, and threw us into the back seat of their car. As we were struggling to grapple with what had just transpired, we noticed that the local mall parking lot was full of police cars, marked and unmarked, and that fire trucks were rolling in from all directions. “Wow, quick response,” was what I thought. Then the two men in the front seat of the car showed us their extremely official police badges and barraged us with questions like, “who are you?” and, “what were you doing back there?” We wanted to say that we were just two buds reminiscing about all those earlier things that I made up instead of talking about girls. But then I realized where they were going with this so I looked at our situation from their perspective. Here they have a local mall completely engulfed in flames when two local boys come tearing out from behind the mall. So they must have put two and two together, and put the two of us together into the back of their cruiser. This is when we started to panic. Not because we were still parked only a few yards away from a fire that was quickly getting out of control, but because large crowds of our neighbours had gathered and were pointing at the two suspects in the back seat of the police car. After a half hour or so of questioning, the officers unexpectedly let us go and released us into the large crowds of our neighbours. We skulked away back to my house and immediately started reminiscing about what had just happened on this, the last summer evening before our senior year at high school. What a great story for our grandchildren! Just for the record, and to reinforce our innocence and emphasize that I am not some sort of firebug, the real perpetrators of the fire were two members of a local motorcycle gang. They had been hired by the proprietor of the local mall to torch the place for insurance purposes. The reason all the emergency vehicles arrived at the scene so quickly was because the police had been tipped off. So they had all the emergency vehicles parked on nearby streets and set up surveillance in the immediate area. My friend and I had bungled into the middle of a giant stakeout, which happens to be the name of a fine movie starring Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez. All I can say is that I am glad that my friend and I bumped into the two police officers instead of the two bikers who set the fire. And “Burn” is not the greatest surname to have in such a situation. ------------ About the author: Nick Burn is a freelance writer from Ottawa, Canada. He can be reached at: njburn@rogers.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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