I met him less than a year before he retired from fire-fighting. When we first married, we lived in a condo about a block from a fire station. The sirens would sound and the trucks speed by several times a day, as he would sit and read through it all. One evening I asked him what he thought of the noise. He thought for a moment. "It’s like the Call of the Wild," glancing up from his Outside magazine.

He doesn’t talk about his experiences often, saying it was just a job. He started back in what they call the Wild West Days, back when firefighters hung on the back of the engine tearing through the streets, and before masks were mandatory. When he was a rookie, the older guys would finish putting out a fire, leave the smoking house coughing up a black lung, then go right to smoking a cigarette.

I try to draw these stories out of his head occasionally because I find them so fascinating. Ptsd lingers in there too, our VA counselor pointed out. I understand his way of dealing with it though, being on such familiar territory. He, on the other hand, gets to live with a brain-addled veteran Artist. Who can possibly understand that? Fun times.

We were both raised in a different world than here, as Ive tried to point out on an old school globe, with just about everybody I know. I even carried around a tiny one like a Talisman of Truth. See? On the world where I grew up, Sicily was tinier and didn’t touch the boot of Italy. The coast of Baja California didn’t have that wave-looking bay, and there was a massive ice cap stretching into half of Canada. After no one seems to understand the significance, including my husband, I’ve learned maybe this IS an entirely different world, and its best for me to keep my observations to myself. But it begs the question, how did I get here? Is it possible to commandeer the rudder, and steer this Titanic to tropical waters instead the cold, albeit slushier north?

Why not.

We were both raised in a different world than now, playing outside with minimal supervision, most of that attendance being a black-and-white tv, fixing our own bikes with a crescent wrench and WD-40. Now we feel old. With proprietary thru axels on hydraulic disc brakes, it took us half an hour to just change a tire, first searching for reading glasses, then struggling through a minute long you-tube instructional video that pretty much said, "this is so easy, its revolutionary." A phone call to a bike shop mechanic still didn’t help, and we are reasonably smart. The frustrating thing was, a month later with another flat tire, it took us 45 minutes again because we couldn’t remember how we finally figured it out the first time. In other words, tech stuff is handy, but be careful not to leave us old folks behind.

This first draft already has the outline of my feral tomboyish childhood. If there is enough interest, I would like to weave in details I remember of my husband’s stories growing up with one foot on the mainland and one in Old Hawaii. When I get it done, I’ll go back and ask him more details about his firefighting career, like how equipment was operated to get that correct, what his co-workers were like, the specifics like how he felt that puts the reader in his shoes.