I grew up mostly in Northern Illinois, but we had a lake house in Indiana.

In Illinois, you go to the fireworks show; in Indiana, you make your own show, complete with igniting high explosives in your yard. Quoting from Wikipedia: Because an M-80 is a pyrotechnic device containing a charge in excess of 50 milligrams of pyrotechnic flash power, civilian use requires a license issued by federal authorities; my grandfather's running gag was lighting them in the hedge in front of the house, permit be damned. He lived for practical jokes like this, making my grandmother scream, standing in the kitchen 15 feet from the hedge, with nothing but a window screen between her and "the bomb".

My dad was never 100% OK with all of this; he worked in a factory where safety was paramount. I don't blame him—he'd seen a lot of industrial accidents—and all the fireworks, and boating, kept him on the edge of his seat. I'm not sure he ever fully enjoyed our time in Indiana.

Even so, you had to laugh at all of it. In our house, gasoline was stored in small, closed containers, if you stored it at all; our neighbors in Indiana thought nothing of warehousing hundreds of gallons of the stuff, in open containers, even as they welded, smoked, and burned leaves in barrels just feet away. And nevermind electrical safety: their handling of gasoline says all you need to know. We saw it all: bad grounding, polarity reversal, overloads. My personal favorite: wedging a penny into the fusebox because the fuse kept blowing and you ran out of fuses.

Yesterday, I learned one of the commercial units in my building had the back door caulked shut, in a failed attempt to stop bad trash odors from getting in. I had to call my dad, because this was such a textbook case of what I'd seen growing up, the sort of "folk remedy" made to solve an immediate problem, with disregard for safety. As an architect, it drives Caroline nuts; she spends countless hours in permit review, the city going over her drawings with a fine-tooth comb, making sure everyone is safe in case of fire, flood, or even earthquakes.

And then some bozo comes along and caulks the door shut. Building permit? Nah

My dad just laughed; terrible, yet so depressingly typical. A ticking time bomb of a fire hazard, all because someone wanted to keep the bad smells out.