My grandmother was the Mrs. Havisham of dynamite. About twice a year she’d go to the Laconia, New Hampshire Police Department and remind the cops she had roughly 200 crates of TNT in her cellar, and twice a year they patronized her with “yes, yes,” and “dear, dear” and “there, there” and that would be the end of it. But then one day she brought a box of decaying dynamite sticks into the station, plunked it down on the desk and said, “My husband loved dynamite, and he left me a house crammed with the stuff, and he’s been gone a long time, Christ, for all I know he’s in Dynamiter’s Heaven. But dynamite decays God dammit, and the whole house is going to blow the next time somebody rings the doorbell!”
It was the doorbell that got their attention.
Planet of the Blind 