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June 23, 2006
Unghk
The plumber is here. Which is actually a good thing. We have a toilet with a slow leak that is discoloring the linoleum. He’s here to fix it. We knew he was coming. Today. So that’s the good part.
The bad part is that I was asleep when he called at 8am. I heard Dave come up the stairs fairly rapidly. I thought someone was dead or injured. He never comes up the stairs that fast. And he said, as I lay there trying to focus on the ceiling, on the walls, on my name “Can you be available for the plumber if he gets here in the next few minutes?”
Yes. Because it was at my nagging that you called him. I’m the one who made the fuss, so, yes.
Get up. Blindly, even with the glasses on, stumble for the dresser. Pull on clothes. Stagger into bathroom. Ablutions. Brush hair. Do I have time to put in my contact—Doorbell. So that would be a no.
I showed him the bathroom. Showed him the stain. Left him to his business. And discovered that the coffeepot was downstairs with Dave who had specifically requested to not be disturbed because he is at this moment giving a presentation to over 100 important people.
If you don’t want to be disturbed, don’t hoard the coffeepot, Mister.
I toddled down the stairs, opened the door to his office. He looked around in annoyance, as in, “Can’t you honor a simple but very important request?” Let me make this clear. He did not say this, only looked it. I’ve been married to Dave for 8 ½ years, with him for 10, known him for 21. I can read his face pretty easily at this point.
“Coffee,” I gasped, barely keeping myself upright with the help of the doorknob.
Bless him. He understood my plight immediately and leapt to the rescue. I toddled back upstairs with the coffeepot and then realized that I had to go back downstairs to give a pill to the cat shut in his office.
Poor Dave.
I feel the need to justify myself at this point. I’m not normally such a slugabed. Well, I am. But I’m frequently up before this and much better at being awake most of the time. It’s just that…
We live in a small town. This is how small it is. There is a civil defense siren on the main fire station. It goes off every day at noon for a minute. So. Everyone in Moscow knows what that siren sounds like.
It is also such a small town that the fire department staff and EMTs are mostly very young. Many are volunteers (even the EMTs). To get good people, the fire department has a really strong training program. And they are flexible for the sake of the many college students who make up the majority of the staff.
Perhaps those two pieces of information together will explain why the siren went off around 1am.
At least, that’s what Dave and I think. We think a couple of the kids were messing around and started the siren by mistake. That doesn’t mean I didn’t lie there in bed wondering if there was some kind of huge emergency. Until I realized that the siren would have kept sounding if there was. And that maybe someone would be driving down the street with a loudspeaker telling everyone to evacuate. Still, being the world-class worrier that I am, I lay in bed imagining clouds of toxic gas from some explosions I hadn’t heard creeping slowly toward the house where we lay innocently in bed with all the windows open.
As we both lay there in bed, not sleeping, Dave gave voice to a thought that had been running through my head as well. “How many calls do you think 911 got about the siren?”
Because it is that kind of small town. The emergency siren goes off at 1am. You know the only way to get any information is to call 911 because it’s too late to get an answer anywhere else in the middle of the night. (The stoplights start flashing at 11pm) And of course, if the emergency siren is going off, the 911 dispatchers couldn’t possibly be busy dealing with the emergency. I’m sure they got eleventy-seven calls from old, frightened people who were afraid the world was about to blow up. (Yes, I just admitted to being worried about the same thing, but you’ll notice I didn’t call 911. Give me some credit for having a brain.)
This is the problem with living in a small town. Something happens in the middle of the night, you have no way to find out what it was. Because the very thing that makes the emergency siren more likely to go off at 1am here (the smallness which leads to children staffing the fire department) is the thing that keeps the news from being accessible immediately (we’re too small to have a TV station other than the itty bitty PBS affiliate at the university).
So instead, we either get in the way by calling 911, OR we lie in bed wondering if Mt. St. Helens just blew and is even now preparing to rain house-flattening ash on our unsuspecting hamlet. (Hey. It happens. Moscow got buried in 1980.)
Posted by sally at June 23, 2006 09:17 AM
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