As those of you who have been reading these little forays into my formative years know by now, I had a quirky childhood. Not as weird as some people, to be sure, but I had my fair share of oddness. This one is no exception, but I must stress- my family is NOT crazy. That said, please enjoy this latest installment…

My father was a gun dealer. Yes, a gun dealer. He’d buy guns and sell them at gun shows on the weekends. So, in-between those weekends, our house had a veritable arsenal inside it. Handguns, shotguns, ammo and everything in-between were everywhere. It wasn’t like he was a crazy, paranoid gun nut, sitting in his basement clutching a gigantic .357 Magnum, muttering about how they’d all pay and whatnot. He just liked guns. It was his hobby. Some people collect stamps or baseball cards, my dad collected firearms.

Eventually, though, he branched out. He started selling holsters and knives and scopes and all the accoutrements that came along with owning a gun. This somehow led to him starting to buy dynamite.

Yes, dynamite. Like the stuff that Snidely Whiplash used in some of his dastardly deeds.

Before you go thinking that I grew up with a crazy person for a father, he started buying dynamite when he began helping the county workers clear beaver dams from drainage ditches, which kept fields from becoming swamps and the local farming community from having to start growing rice in paddies. The dynamite was used after they cleared out the beavers from the dam, as a quick and easy (and, admittedly, really freaking cool) way to clear the logs and sticks and mud.

After awhile, though, there were less and less beaver dams to clear and my dad still had dynamite left over. We all know what idle hands can get their fingers into and it was only a matter of time before he came to my room with a grin on his face and asked if I “wanted to go use up the rest of the dynamite.”

Being in my early teens, mere milliseconds passed before I was out the door, ready and rearing to blow some shit up. Hell yeah!!

It just so happened that we had a rotting tree stump in our backyard that needed to be disposed of. Three sticks of dynamite later, we were stump-less and had broken three windows on the back of the house. My mother was furious, as neither of us had told her what we were up to and the explosion had scared the shit out of her.

Later that fall, we targeted another stump, this time further from the house and packed with a little less dynamite, just to be on the safe side. Unfortunately, this time around, my dad misjudged the timing of the det cord (longer means you have more time before the explosion, shorter means…well, you get the idea) and had to run for cover behind a tree before the blast.

We must’ve looked hilarious, a grown man and his son, running around giggling like schoolgirls and blowing shit up.

By the time winter rolled around, I thought that the fun was over. We had basically exhausted the remainder of the dynamite and everything was covered in a think layer of snow, so it was harder to find things to load up and make go BOOM. But, right after one of our benevolent neighbors had come by with his snowplow and shoveled out our driveway, my dad had a great idea- stick the remaining dynamite into the 20 foot snow pile and blow it sky-high.

The result was my dad’s pickup being covered in over a foot of fresh of snow and the entire driveway needing to be re-plowed. So, we called up our neighbor and explained that we needed him to come back over and re-do what he had just done only hours earlier. When he arrived, we both met him, with shit-eating grins on our faces and explained what had happened. After he got done laughing, his only response was, “You at least could have waited a week before making me come all the way back over here.”

People who wonder where I get my mischievous side from have no further to look than my father. It’s probably a good thing that, as an adult, I do not have access to high-powered explosives and lots of free time.