Jun
19

Well, Fire-fighting is Thirsty Work.

This morning on my way to work I was listening to a very sad story on NPR about four dolphins who washed ashore, each with a fatal bullet wound. The agent in charge of the investigation was being interviewed, and several times in the course of the brief segment she opined that it was possible the dolphins were simply in “the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Ahem. Am I missing part of this story? Did these dolphins interrupt an armed robbery in progress? Was it a case of mistaken identity? Were they flopping happily down a street in a tough L.A. neighborhood when they found themselves the unintended victims of a drive-by shooting?

No. THEY WERE IN THE OCEAN. Now, I am not a marine biologist, but I have always thought that the ocean was the perfect place for a dolphin.
I predict that sales of Kevlar bathing suits will go through the roof this summer.

The plagiarist mentioned in my previous entry deleted the offending parts of her post on Sunday night, and sent me an apology. So that’s that, I suppose.
Scott was very upset by the incident.
“I feel like I should DO something,” he kept saying on Saturday. He wanted me to post a link to the offender. I declined. He wanted me to post a withering comment on the poached entry. I declined again, and extracted from him (with some difficulty) a promise that he would NOT take matters into his own hands. This promise was honored until approximately 15 seconds after I went to bed, when he left an angry comment on the plagiarist’s website (the comment has since been removed, thank heavens). I woke him up, furious, at 7am on Sunday.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, “I wanted to defend you.”

This was sweet, in its way. It would have been sweeter if, in the comment, he hadn’t gotten the name of my blog wrong. Sigh.

Thank you all for assuring me that I was not overreacting. I am not sure where this pathological fear of overreacting comes from, but it has gotten me into trouble before. Trouble that involved sirens and a house full of firemen, believe it or not.

{insert flashback harp music}

One morning during the summer before I left for college, I was lying on the couch eating Haagen Dazs out of the carton and watching a 90210 marathon (my life hasn’t changed much in the intervening decade, as you can see), when I noticed the air smelled a little…funny. I wandered around the house searching for the source of the smell, and when I looked down the stairs leading to the basement, I saw the air was hazy with smoke. I had another bite of ice cream and wondered what to do.
Now if this had been a movie, the audience would have screamed at the befuddled, spoon-licking heroine to CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT.

But she would not have listened. After all, surely that whole “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire” thing is overstated. Surely sometimes there is just smoke–harmless, ordinary smoke of unknown (but benign!) origin.
Or perhaps the haze I had seen was dust. Basements are notoriously dusty.
I didn’t want to be reactionary. I had a reputation for being a tad overdramatic, and I knew that if I called my mother and told her I thought there might be some kind of fire, she would assume that I had been frightened by the smoky scent of a neighbor’s mesquite-flavored potato chips. I put the ice cream away and called a friend.

“Oh, did I wake you? I can call back…Are you sure? Well…don’t be alarmed, but there seems to be some smoke coming from my basement.”

Her (loud, screechy) advice was to call 911, a notion I dismissed out of hand as being unduly alarmist. Besides, I was unshowered and wearing pajamas—the last thing I needed {Ed. Note: Besides a FIERY DEATH} was neighbors gawking while the street filled with fire trucks and a local news crew descended upon me, splashing pictures of my unkempt self all over television.

I went upstairs to wash my hair. By now, smoke was beginning to seep up through the vents. Out of deference to the severity of the situation, I skipped the conditioner. While I was getting dressed, I called my friend again to ask if the fire department had unmarked cars. You know, someone they could send just to take a look and determine whether firefighters were really necessary. More screeching ensued.
I then had the brilliant idea to bypass 911 and call the local fire station directly.

“Hi. There seems to be some smoke coming from my basement and it’s probably nothing but–”
“Okay. You’re going to need to hang up and call 911. Get out of the house.”
“No, no, no—I just wondered if–”
“MA’AM. MA’AM. You need to hang up this phone and dial 911.”
I hung up.
His “get out of the house” comment was worrisome. What if the house exploded? That possibility hadn’t occurred to me. I saw an imaginary fireball exploding before my eyes, sending gory Alexa-shrapnel splattering into the neighbors’ hydrangeas.

I never did call 911, because I was just that much of an idiot at age 18. Instead, I rushed outside with the phone and sat in my car, trying to get up the nerve to dial the number. A few moments later I heard sirens: the man from the fire station had saved me the trouble.
There was a small electrical fire in some sort of furnace-related motor in the basement. It was speedily extinguished and the firefighters brought in a fan the size of a Hummer to clear out the smoke.

I occupied myself hanging up the heavy coats they dropped on the floor, brushing the soot off them, and asking whether I couldn’t get anyone anything to drink. I may not be the best person in a crisis, but I can make that person a killer mojito.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |