When the police came to the big house on Pleasant Street they brought pillows. The squad cars were filled with feather pillows. It looked like they’d raided an orphanage. It was my first experience of quotidian surrealism—cops with pillows and wooden boxes and their faces tight with concern; small town officers preparing to face death, for the house before them was really stuffed to the gills with dynamite and it was crotchety dynamite, old, rascally vicious TNT and the truth was, it could blow at any minute and everyone could die. Somehow what with familiarity—because she’d lived with the dynamite for such a long time—my grandmother thought the sight of cops with pillows was ridiculous—though she didn’t say so. She told us later, that seeing cops gently laying stick after stick of dynamite in pillowed boxes was laughable, and better yet, their tippy toed, hunched parade up the basement stairs, each man holding his breath, was risibly tight, so much so she’d had to run away and pee.
It took the cops eight hours to remove the TNT.
“Somehow I never thought the stuff would explode,” my grandmother said. “But the cops’ fear,” she said, “that was priceless.”
Planet of the Blind 