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This past Thursday I was at the dining room table, eating a light supper and paging through a new New Yorker under a bright desk lamp, while Celeste was eating in the living room, in her La-Z-Boy recliner, and watching the evening news on TV. I could hear the broadcast pretty well, though I was trying to ignore it. I could see part of the TV screen over the top of C.’s chair.
An item came on in the news, and I saw like ten seconds of it: I saw a pickup truck on fire on a freeway in Florida. Big flames, people screaming, and a chubby guy seemed to be stuck as he tried to climb out of the driver’s-side window. His butt was on the window sill, his back to the camera, and he was bellowing that he couldn’t get out, and then two guys pulled him out. I don’t know if I saw the actual rescue, or if I just heard a reporter say that’s what happened. Then I heard one of the rescuers saying to a reporter something like, “... I looked around and saw about twenty people with their cell phones out and nobody doing anything, so we ran up and pulled the guy out.”
Very brief, the whole report. Felt like ten seconds, but might have been sixty seconds, I don’t know. When the scene changed, I hollered to ask Celeste if the guy was all right. She said she wasn’t sure. And then I had a terrible thought, something I feel guilty for, now. The thought was, Maybe the guy was texting, maybe it would have been all right to let him perish in a fiery wreck. One less hazard on the highway. I had no evidence to support that terrible thought, and I truly hope I don’t shout, “Did you bring this upon yourself?” if I ever have to decide whether to pull someone from a fire.
Amazingly, though, the next day, Friday, Valentine’s Day, I got a chance to push some people away from a fire alarm. Not necessarily from a fire, but, yes, from a fire alarm. Celeste had a nine-forty-five O.T. appointment at Cappella Hospital, a follow-up to her recent carpal tunnel surgery. We got out of the O.T. session about ten-fifteen. We planned to go to lunch at the Thai restaurant that recently opened in Cappella. The Thai place opens at eleven, so we figured we would do a quick visit with some friends at an assisted living place not far from the hospital. Celeste had made a Valentine’s card and had thought to get, at the hospital café, a big chocolate-chip cookie for one of her pals, a lady ninety-seven years of age.
The day was brilliantly sunny and bitingly cold, eight degrees below zero, according to the thermometer on our RAV4’s dash. The assisted living place consists of two buildings separated by a wide driveway and some parking stalls. We parked in front of what’s labeled the Memory Care Community, but our friends are in what I call the Memory Still Okay Building. Celeste and I got out of the car and began cautiously crossing the driveway. It was salted, cleared of snow and ice, but it is sloped and a little rough. As we crossed, a staff person, in indoor attire, sprinted past us, crying out, “Fire alarm!” When she opened the door of the glassed entrance of Memory Still Okay, we heard the blare of an alarm inside, and we saw that the vestibule was filled with folks in wheelchairs all queued up, awaiting directions and, some of them, awaiting a push. Beyond the wheelchairs were folks with walkers, and beyond the walkers were old folks on foot. Some people had on proper winter coats, some were wrapped in blankets, and some were dressed for springtime. A staff person near the door held a phone to her ear and seemed to be speaking with an emergency dispatcher. After a moment, she announced, “We are going out! We are evacuating the building!”
Celeste and I asked, “May we help?” and we, with other visitors and staff persons, started to ferry folks across to the warmth and safety of the Memory Care building. The alarm horns continued to blare. A smoky stink was in the air, though we didn’t actually see any smoke. Police and firefighters, fully dressed for action, began to arrive. An attendance count confirmed that all thirty-two residents of Memory Okay safely crossed the driveway and, eventually, when the all-clear was given, safely returned home again.
What was it all about? Well, we heard that, apparently, a fragrance dispenser, the kind that plugs into an electrical outlet, had overheated and melted. The firefighters, we were told, took a while to find the problem because the faulty item happened to be inside the facility director’s locked office. And the office happened to be locked on that bitterly cold Wisconsin day, because the director happened to be, reportedly, away on a brief visit to Florida, a state coincidentally famous for fiery freeway rescues.
I am pleased to tell you I didn’t have any terrible thoughts on Valentine’s Day. And Celeste and I enjoyed a delightful meal of Thai cuisine.
♦
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