Apr. 07, 2007 - 15:31 MDT

? ALARM FIRE

Heather had rented a house in Oldsmar, a small one room type place where I learned about the lizards who could walk up and down panes of glass and such things.

When I got some steady work we had come up in the world enough that we found a ramshackle frame house in West Oldsmar sitting among dry weeds about five feet in height. There was a path cut from the house out back to a circle of cleared land for the purposes of trash burning. At the time the circle appeared to me to be small, but I am the Nervous Nellie when it comes to fire.

Oldest son was about 8 going on 9 when after watching me and listening to my advice I decided he could take out the trash and carefully burn it.

I was working third shift at the time and normally I would come home, eat breakfast, glance at the news and go to bed.

We did the best we could with sleeping, various beds, etc. I ended up in the top bunk of a bunk bed, much to the envy of oldest son.

Heather had maintained that I could sleep through anything without waking up, and for the most part she was right. Having worked many hours and many 7 day shifts, sometimes double shifts I was used to crawling up on the desk, with the phone at my head and catching 40 or more winks, I could answer the phone and jump to it or go back to sleep as the occasion warranted.

This one day son built the trash fire a bit close to the tall weeds and they caught fire. Bless him he ran inside and told his Mom, "The weeds are on fire." Heather and the kids came running into the bed room and she said, "Doug, the weeds are on fire."

That's when my experience at the freight house came in handy. I was immdiately awake, jumping down from the upper bunk, strewing family like ten pins and headed to the sink filling buckets. Heather brough my pants to the kitchen and I poured myself into them as the buckets filled.

Then out the door, into the yard and sloshing water in the worst spots, when I emptied a bucket son ran into the house and filled it, rushing back out with as much water as he could carry.

It was miraculous almost, we got the fire out before that dry old frame house caught fire.

After that Heather changed her words to, "Doug can sleep through most everything."

Little by little I cut down more weeds, but they grew so fast that as soon as possible we moved into a house in Oldsmar where the yard was St. Augustine grass, only we had to watch the kids that they didn't get into Tampa Bay.

I doubt that I would do as well, as rapidly as I did that day on the ? ALARM FIRE . . . . . . . . . . . .

Blog