My maternal grandmother was the Mrs. Havisham of dynamite. Twice a year she’d go to the Laconia, New Hampshire Police Department to remind the cops she had 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 one day she brought a box of decaying dynamite sticks into the station, plunked it 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.
My grandfather was a mad dynamiter. He loved TNT and he’d travel far and wide in rural New Hampshire to find things he could blow up. For a time he had some money and he’d buy abandoned houses in the middle of nowhere and reduce them to matchsticks. He blew up a telephone pole—when the phone people came he swore he’d never seen it. He exploded boats, cars, barns, even an outhouse. Rather than digging a new hole and moving the thing he just stuck dynamite down the hole. He blew human waste for a quarter of a mile. My mother remembered that there was a toilet seat up in the limb of a tree.
What’s your hobby? Do you have one? I hear hobbies are making a comeback. Dynamite isn’t a traditional leisure activity.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
