Joel’s version of the Match Game…

On a small shelf on the wall next to my oven there are three items – a pot I use exclusively for heating water (because of the excessively hard water: If you saw the inside of the pot you’d understand) a Bic lighter, and a box of matches. The matches are used for lighting the propane stove and also the woodstove.

My kitchen stove has perfectly good pilot lights, which would normally make matches kind of redundant. But for some reason I’ve never fully understood, probably having to do with the 24/7 nature of their function, those pilots use up a lot of propane. The oven pilot must of course stay lit but I can get weeks more use out of a propane bottle by turning off the stovetop pilots and lighting the burners with matches.

So anyway: The shelf:

The Match Game, like most of my “how far can I stretch it” games, arose from an unexpected famine. The little town nearest where I live has some of the most dysfunctional commercial infrastructure I’ve ever encountered. The retailers share a single data line so that when “the internet goes down,” all the town’s ATMs and store counter card readers stop functioning. This can last for days. They also apparently have a very narrow corridor for grocery supplies, because every store in town can run out of the same thing simultaneously and stay out of it for weeks. This is the town that once ran out of eggs. And once, actually for a couple of months, it ran out of wooden matches. In winter.

That last experience taught me something useful. A box of matches at the dollar store holds 300 matches and costs a buck. There’s no conceivable excuse not to keep a lot on hand and I do. Now. But during my first or second winter in the Secret Lair I had to make a nearly-empty box of matches last.

The game consists very simply of seeing how long I can stretch a box of matches. Whenever I unwrap a new box I do two things: I put a box of matches on my shopping list, and I write the current date on the box I just opened. Then I note the date when I use up the last match. My record is four months, and I’m on track to break that record. Even in winter, when of course I use more matches.

You stretch matches, in case you care, by using each one multiple times. That’s what the Bic lighter is for. Bics are even cheaper than matches, flame for flame, but they’re awkward for some uses because you don’t want your thumb too close to the flame. That’s what the match is for, to keep from singing your thumb.

This all came to mind this morning because coming down the ladder I was faced with a difficult play: The match sitting on the kitchen stove was already more than half gone. I use the same match for lighting the stove burner and also the fire lighter in the woodstove, and I’ve never successfully scored both with a match more than half burned. I always end up dropping it into the woodstove before burning my fingers, and then being forced to expend a new match – sort of a penalty kick in the game. But this morning I lit both flames with the same less-than-half-a-match, dropping it into the firebox at the last conceivable instant and using up every available millimeter of the match. Score and a hat trick!

And people ask me if I get bored… 🙂