My Grampa, as many of you who may have read about him know, lived through the Great Depression and therefore developed a tendency to save everything thruout his life. He was quite the pack rat - when we went to clean his house out it was a rather astonishing feat. When he ran across good deals or free things, he couldn't pass them up. He had over 80 cases of motor oil in his garage (yes, EIGHT ZERO). 14 ceiling fans, unopened in the basement. Stacks of napkins and terlit paper, some of which dated back to the 70s. The list goes on and on, it was a virtual flea market/junkyard in disguise.
Of the many things I "inherited" from his estate, one of my prize possessions is a Ziploc baggy full of literally hundreds of books of matches from his favorite place in the world (and one of mine, mostly due to the nostalgia of eating there as a tyke), Carbone's Pizza on Randolph. Matches were complimentary there, and Gramps was always sure to pocket a few during each visit and take 'em home. Why? They were free. Never know when you'll need 1,000 books of matches.
So I cracked the Ziploc bag open and fetched one of these neat matchbooks to ignite a candle the other day. I noticed on the front of the matchbook under the bitchin' Carbone's logo of a chef giving the "OK!" hand gesture were some handy instructions:
CLOSE COVER..STRIKE ON BACK
Up until this point, I had never been able to figure out how to get a match to reach the point of combustion. I would tear out and shake a match vigorously in the air hoping that would work. I would turn on a stovetop burner and hold the match above it to achieve the desired effect. I even at times would intensely focus my eyes on a match for about 3 minutes and then repeatedly yell "FIRE! FIRE! MAKE FIRE!" until my throat hurt.
So after reading this helpful hint on the matches, I closed the cover as directed and struck the match on the back of the book. Sure as shit, poof - a flame appeared. I could not believe my eyes. I shook the match out, dropped it, and tried another one. Flame. Another one. Yet again: Flame.
This is really fun, and I'm glad I've got a whole bag of them all to myself. Seeing that a lot of these are likely over 20 years old, maybe I should go through each and every one of these matches tonight to make sure they all still work.
