An odd happening in my neighborhood, this spring.

One spring-dusk I’m walking back from over by campus in the one college town that I now live in, and like a block and a half up from me, there’s all these fire department and emergency vehicles and there’s tape cordoning off quite a bit of the street, so I sidle over to two (white) (college-age) students standing and observing things, and I ask them what happened.

“Oh, we were walking home and we were walking by that house and we heard water,” the (trimly mustachioed) (young 20-something) guy was like, explaining that a pipe likely burst while people were away, and when they went to go knock on the door and check, they smelled gas, too, so they got away from there and called emergency services right away, and now they’re all taking care of it.

“That’s good,” I was like.

Then, after a pause, I was like, “But to be honest, I kind of want to see it go up in a big fireball, like in Diehard.”

And, they didn’t disagree.