Author: ICRTD

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Step By Step

So, if you’ve come by here (or the other place) you’re probably aware that I’m retiring from the FD.  This place has been many things for me, and to me for that matter.  Not the least of which is as fodder for my writing.  I’ve gleaned multiple posts from the adventures, and misadventures of the guys I work with.  Myself included.

But, the end is getting closer, as ends are inclined to do.

To wit; I’ve turned in my paper.

As I told the kids when I sent them a group text- it’s officially official.  September 15th will be the last day I spend in a firehouse.  That feels weird to say btw.  Not bad mind you, just… weird.  I’ve tried really hard to maintain some type of normal identity.  It’s so easy to let this job become all-encompassing and I don’t know that that is entirely healthy.  I love my job, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve never been “that” guy that has to, for example, drive to and from work in uniform.  I don’t ask if there’s a “government employee” discount anymore.  Although if I should happen to get pulled over for speeding I won’t hesitate to offer that info up to the police officer that pulls me over.

If that should happen, that is.  And it hasn’t happened for a really long time fwiw.  I still remember that event too, lol.  Diane and I were driving one of the Quiet Child’s friends home after a sleepover or something, three teenage girls in the back seat chatting away about god knows what.  I saw the cop pull out behind me in my mirror, looked at my speed and saw him flip his lights on.  Hopefully I didn’t use too bad of a word to express my feelings, what with the girls in the back seat.  But I pulled right over and rolled down my window.  When the officer came up to me and asked if I knew how fast I was going (as I recall it was 10 or so over the limit, in town) I told him I did, I apologized, and I asked if it mattered that I was a firefighter.  He asked where, I told him, he rolled his eyes, handed back my license and told me to slow down.

Anyway, the Oldest One asked me if I was excited.  This is apparently a theme, since almost every step along the way someone asks me if I’m excited about what looms ahead.  My answer to her, and it’s become my standard response, is this…

Have you ever known the word “excited” to describe me?

To which the family photojournalist replied “You are the most excited I’ve ever seen you around baked goods and I’m sure there will be plenty”  Just another example of what a smart woman she is.

Now, mind you, I’m not actively soliciting baked goods for my last day.  But if you feel the need, well, who am I to deny you?

But I actually did request something for my last day.  I asked that, instead of having a big reception at our headquarters station, if we could just do an open house type thing at Station 3 I would prefer that.  The FD administration graciously agreed.  The guys I work with have done a great job of looking out for the old guy for the last couple years, and they all supported my idea and I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to the amount of amazing food that will be put out for the day.  If you’re in the are on the 15th, stop by and say “Hi”.

There are many, many things I won’t miss about “the job”.  Getting up in the middle of the night for an abuse of the 9-1-1 system, standing at the pump panel in mid January, in three inches of ice and slush at a house fire, wrestling with drunks or psych calls that went south, I could go on and on.

But what I will miss, and what I could not (even if I wanted to) replace is the friendships, the esprit de corps, the feeling of being a part of something bigger than oneself that this job foists upon you.  I owe so much to so many for making me, not only a better firefighter/paramedic, but for making me a better human being.

I typically don’t like to try to list people, out of fear I’ll forget someone but without John, Bill, Mike, Norm, Jeff, Cal, Jim, Vin, Tommy, Kevin, Jerry and all the rest I wouldn’t be near the man I am (or think I am) today.  I’ve worked with some amazing crews and witnessed cohesion you can’t imagine and I’m grateful for that too.

A lot of times there is talk of Brotherhood in this job and I have no better example of that bond than this.  When Diane died, while meeting with the funeral director to make her arrangements we got to the part about who her pallbearers would be.  The director suggested that perhaps we could use her nephews and fill in with her brothers.  I didn’t want that, I felt their time should be spent mourning.  I called Vin.  We were partners at the time, and he had told me a day or two earlier that the guys from Local 3234 wanted to do something to help.  So I asked him to get some pallbearers.  And I promptly forgot about it because I knew the guys I worked with would take care of me.  So now, as I look back on the brothers I served with, I want to thank John, Joe, Phil, Jim, Tom and Vin for what you guys did for my family that day.  I know I thanked you all back then, but I don’t believe it’s humanly possible to thank you enough.  

I love you guys.

From the bottom of my heart.

Peace

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Along For The Ride

I think I’ve been on record, here and in other places, that I’m genuinely fond of the guys I work with.  Mostly.  There are, however, exceptions.

Occasionally, they can be jerks.

Case in point…

I got a phone call yesterday from my new Lieutenant, to give me a heads up about a rider we had for the first half of our shift today.  This btw is not the jerk part.  Quite the opposite, I really appreciated it.  The jerk part comes in when he said the other three guys wanted our rider to be a surprise for me.

Allow me to explain.

Today’s guest was a fifteen year-old, home-schooled, kid from Kansas.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no intention of painting with a broad brush anyone who is either A.) home schooled or B.) from Kansas.  I don’t doubt there are many fine human beings that have been home schooled and I know Kansas has produced many wonderful people.  But this kid?  Let me just say if you look up socially awkward in the dictionary I’m pretty sure you’ll see his face.  He just seemed to have, oh, let’s call it a naiveté about him.  I think that puts it politely.

And I’m nothing if not polite, right?  I mean after all, while we were standing by on a gas leak this morning, noting his fair (I mean ridiculously fair) complexion (like, Holy Christ kid, have you ever been out in the sun before?) I told Thurman (that’s not his real name btw, but it just fit him so well that I kept calling him that all day) he should get in the shade so he didn’t get a sunburn.

See?  I am one caring, compassionate individual.

Another way to describe him might be to refer you to that cinematic masterpiece “Bad Santa” which, not coincidentally, is how we gave our rider his name.  If you know the movie I need not say any more.  If you don’t know it, well I’m not going to suggest you make a point to watch it, but if you do watch it, try and visualize Thurman in a firehouse full of smart alecky, Type “A”, alpha males.

Also, despite the festive, holiday sounding name of the movie, don’t let your kids watch it.  Just sayin’

Insert wide eyed emoji >here<.

The day was, thankfully, pretty uneventful save for our two hour long gas leak, so we didn’t need to babysit this kid all too much.

And don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against riders.  They are almost always (note I said “almost”) a lot of fun to have.  Usually it’s a paramedic student or someone otherwise interested in becoming one of us, but sometimes it’s some other friend of the program that genuinely…

Ok, I take that back.  Here’s what I have against riders.  It’s known as “The Curse of the Riders” and in essence it means that, when we have a rider, we don’t run calls.  Until after the rider goes home.  Then the wheels fall off.  I started this missive last night, after Thurman left.  I made it as far as the last paragraph, at which point we went out on a crash, due in no small part to the driver taking a somewhat more than therapeutic level of heroin; followed immediately by two plus hours of stand by at an alleged armed standoff.  And the centerpiece on our night came at 4:00 am for an activated alarm at a nursing home.   But, when we got back into quarters this morning around 5:30 (finally) the guys from the ambulance had the coffee made and waiting for us already.

So, yeah sometimes these guys are jerks, especially when they try and get the kid to call me Santa.

But the simple, little, act of having coffee ready for us when we got back goes a long way towards buying…

Peace

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Triggers

As Sophie and I were enjoying a leisurely walk this morning after I got home from work, my mind started to wander.  If you ever read any of my stuff you know this is not a new phenomenon.  By any definition.

I thought about the anniversary of Diane’s death tomorrow, which coincides with the birthday of the little Diamond, who is turning two.  I wrote about this confluence of events and the emotions it brought out last year so I’m not going to get into that again, exactly.  But those thoughts morphed into these; the grandchild formerly known as Beatle Baby starts Kindergarten this week.  Meaning, he is now where the Heir To The Throne was when Diane died.

And I circled around in my head where we were eleven years ago today.  To the best of my recollection we spent a good portion of the day in her hospital room, talking about the days and weeks to come.  I had brought in pictures of the dogs to display in her room, the almost one year old Sophie and Tobi the Jack Russell terrorist (not a typo) and Diane mentioned to me that one of the nurses had told her I could bring Sophie over for a visit, to the outdoor sitting area that was just outside of her hospital room.

As I’ve said in the past (I may have even written about it before, I’m not sure) when you lose someone close to you, you don’t need triggers to think about them.  In fact, I think just the opposite is true, especially early on into your grief; you need a trigger of some sort to NOT think about them.

This evolves over time.  Of course when you’re living it, that time feels as though it will never arrive.

While I was at work yesterday I was going through my email and I’m not sure how it happened but I found an old “mailbox” that I used to store emails from an old account.

One Diane and I shared.

As I read through some of the last emails she received, mostly from families she served as an AAIM advocate, I flashed back through so many memories.  And when I say “flash” I mean it.  I pushed them through my brain as quickly as I could because the firehouse is the last place on earth I want to get emotional and I knew if I dwelled on those memories it would be unavoidable.  The hardest part for me was looking through some pictures Diane’s brother sent me, in case I needed them for her wake.  In so many of the images her beauty leapt out at me and there were so many great pictures.  This one in particular gets me every time, as it one of my favorites of the two of us.

It was taken at the reception we held in our backyard after the Quiet Child got married and it was one of our best days after Caitlin was killed.

I think maybe all of this was compounded by the fact that I’ll be on the road tomorrow, headed south to house hunt for a few days.  I probably would have swung by the cemetery tomorrow, although that may be my head telling me that because I know since I’m in transit tomorrow it won’t happen.  I can’t honestly say I would have gone had I been home all day.

But either way, I know I’ll be thinking of her all day tomorrow.

Even without the triggers.

Peace

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Still More Fables From The Firehouse

Ok, a couple of things here before I go on.  You may have noticed a completely different look here.  I’m trying a different site to publish.  I’m not sure how this is going to go, so… I guess we’ll see what happens.  If you’d like to leave some feedback about how things look and work from the readers end, please do, I’d love to find out.  If not, well, I got nuthin’

To the post.

Friday, on shift, I got a FaceTime call from a couple friends of mine from up by where I live.  They were working up at their firehouse and felt the strong urge to share something we had previously discussed.

New guys.

We’ve got them, they’ve got them, and since I’ve poked fun at ours here fairly regularly, Dan and Matt have shared some of the pitfalls their new guys have put out for their (Dan and Matt’s) entertainment.  Once I pointed out to Matt the error in the timing of his call, since it was 11:37 and we were just sitting down  (the goal is to be done with lunch by noon so as not to impede our safety nap) to lunch, I was entertained by a live feed of a new guy doing lunch prep (see what I did there?) in the form of slicing an onion.  It quickly became clear to me why we have “cut” gloves in our kitchen.  Yikes.  And, about five slices into the onion, sure enough, there’s blood on the onion.  Not much, Matt had to zoom in to show it, but much laughter and good-natured ridicule ensued.  Side note, no animals were harmed in the filming and the new guy needed only a small Band Aid to stem the flow.  Moments later, I got this…

The comment followed, as it often does when stupidish stuff happens at work, that I should write about the new guy’s lack of kitchen skills.  And I thought about it.  I mean, I set this site up last week and I’ve kind of been looking for an opportunity to try it out.  But I felt like I needed something more to flesh this out into a full post.  Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

The universe provides…

Early Saturday morning… wait, let me back up… Friday afternoon we got a call; a single engine response for an AFA (Activated Fire Alarm) for smoke in a building.  No fire but smoke from an unknown source.  We got there, the Lt. went in and soon came back out to request more resources, an upgrade to a Full Still.  In our FD that means one more engine, a ladder truck, a squad and the battalion chief.  It wasn’t a fire, we just needed more resources, so I walked back in with Lt. Cal, cause I was curious to see what we had.  Light smoke, no heat kind of thing.  We talked about what it probably was and, ultimately, found a bad HVAC unit on the roof was the cause of the smoke.  Problem solved.

Now, on to Saturday morning about 2:15, we get a call for a Full Still in a big box electronics store.  We pulled up to the store and went to the back of the building to access the fire alarm panel.  I waited in the engine while Cal and our new guy went in to check it out.  I noticed a hydrant about one hundred feet from me across the parking lot.  Cal came back out after a minute and asked for an upgrade to a General Alarm which increases the turn out significantly, including bringing in neighboring departments to man our stations while we’re working.  Typically, this means we’ve got an actual fire, but Cal reported they hadn’t found it yet due to significant smoke in the building.

Brief pause here for editorial notes- Boss if you’re reading this, you might want to skip down a couple paragraphs.  At least till next month.  Tom, I know you read this, you might want to skip down too.  Btw, you did a great job! Ok, that’s a blatantly shameless, suck uppy sounding comment, but nonetheless…

Moving on.

Of course, I couldn’t let this sit as it was.  I had to go in and see what we had.  Again.  As before, I followed Cal back in, to the electrical room and asked him what he had.  He and the new guy both described the smoke volume as “to the floor” as they headed back into the store itself from the back room.  I followed them as we finished talking, out onto the sales floor and immediately hit visibility that would’ve fit right in on “Werewolves of London”.  Light gray, down to the floor, maybe 10 feet of visibility.  As I stood there, just inside the sales area, I heard the very distinctive “click” of the door closing, and locking, behind me.

Ruh Roh.

Now, in case you missed the relevance here, my job at this particular point in time, is to make sure the guys that are inside looking for fire actually have water to put on said fire when they find it.  In oder to do that, I need to be at the fire engine.  Which is, as you may remember, outside the building.  You see my dilemma…  I knew the dock area was around the corner and down to my left so I started down that way, and found the gate was locked.  I went back to the original door, the one that caused my problem, and sure enough, it was still locked.  Hey sometimes you get lucky, so I took a shot.  Fortunately, I quickly saw an Emergency Exit about ten feet away from me.  I thought, yup, this qualifies, and exited the building right next to my engine in plenty of time to pull over to the hydrant before anyone else got back by us.

I made the hydrant hook up as the next-in crew was pulling the hose off the back of the engine and, until now, no one was the wiser.  As it turned out, the sprinkler system did a great job of holding the fire in check and our new guy was able to extinguish the fire with the pump can, less than three gallons.

There ended up being significant smoke and water damage to the store although  it certainly would have been much. much worse had there been no sprinkler.

There are many things I won’t miss when I’m no longer “on-the-job”, waking up in the middle of the night being foremost; but the actual work, the camaraderie, the feeling after a successful outcome, and the often non-stop joking, even at my own expense, is going to be hard to replace.

Peace

 

PS- let me know how theist works and feels for you.  Thanks.  And again…

Peace

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Under Construction

If you get directed here, I apologize.  But for now – Move along, nothing to see here.  I’m going to be tinkering with this new site for a while before I decide to launch it on the regular.  So pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…