“The Time I Set My Brother’s Hair on Fire”

By Jerry Morian

June 11, 2026 1:50 am

I’ve been thinking about my brother Blaine a lot lately. He passed in 1983, but in my mind, he’s still 14 months younger than me, still my best friend, and still shaking his head at the dumb things we got away with.

This is one of those dumb things.

We had just left a Kroger store in the city where we grew up. In the bag – a can of butane. We both started smoking early in life, and back then, there weren’t any rules stopping us from the purchase. So there we were, standing in the parking lot like a couple of idiots with a new can of fuel and too much time on our hands.

I don’t know what came over me.

I took off the top of the butane can, pulled out my lighter, and without thinking – without any thought at all – I lit the lighter and sprayed the butane directly into the flame.

I didn’t think about where Blaine was either.

Out shot a flame so long and so fast that it scorched the top of his head. His hair started smoking. I remember standing there, watching this small plume rise from his scalp, and instead of panicking, I started laughing. Hard. The kind of laughing where you can’t breathe.

Blaine didn’t say a word. He just stood there, stunned, with singed hair and a look that said, “I am going to kill you.”

When the smoke cleared and I finally put out whatever tiny fire was left, I kept laughing. I couldn’t stop. I think he might have been in shock, because he didn’t laugh. He didn’t even react. Just stood there, processing what his older brother had just done.

Then the anger came.

He cussed me up one wall and down another. Called me every name he could think of. I deserved every single one.

Eventually, after a long while, he calmed down. And somewhere in there, he started to see the humor in it. Not as much as I did – not even close – but enough that he stopped wanting to strangle me.

Years later, that memory became one of our favorites. We’d be sitting around, maybe a couple of beers in our hands, and someone would mention the Kroger parking lot. We’d both start laughing. Sometimes so hard that the beer would spill.

It was never hard to recall that day, because the hair on top was never the same. It looked singed for the rest of his life. A permanent reminder of his brother’s stupidity.

I miss him. I miss those laughs. I miss the way we could turn almost anything into a story.

But I’m grateful I still have the memory.

What’s a funny memory you have of someone you’ve lost? I’d love to hear it.