On the Other Side of the Ocean, a Storm
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Like when I used to relate tales of firefighting derring-do, back when the most exciting time of my day rhymed with swoon. Hours before a dream where I returned to my high school with new found coolness, only to realize that the smiles were scowls, and the re--------,* in fact resentment. I stopped talking of anything that might make me seem better than I am (except when it comes to the profound jealousy I feel in competing for affection).
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Like when I sat very, very close, and she reached for the cream, in a tiny china ewer, and I noticed the lines in her arms marked a decade of gardening, and I knew that I was going to continue to make eye contact until it was returned, irrespective of our age difference, and then turn away when she realized what I meant.
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Like when I realized that my most favoritest (mostest) misspelled word is becasue, because it evokes a backwards country girl with multicolored ribbons in her long, brown hair.
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Anyway. It’s like when I drove past an accident today, and I noticed the big red engine pull in right behind the police cruiser, and the driver of the engine was smiling, and then I smiled, because I KNEW why he was smiling and no one else did, and nothing is funnier than an inside joke, even when you have nobody to share it with, though a few of you know what it’s like to carry someone in your heart to the extent that you are never truly alone, and every joke is shared. He was smiling because the police and firefighters carry on a sort of unwritten competition, and while the cops have guns, they can’t use them on firefighters, and the firefighters have bigger vehicles and they use them with impunity. A blue canary, I believe, is what we used to call it, trapping the police inside an accident scene with our tenders and ambulances so that they had to ask us to move, and we always did, but sometimes we were slow about it. And I never really got the hang of this maneuver, because fuck if I know why I want to humiliate a cop.
Like, once, a cop came to our station when it was broken into, and walking on the broken shards, he pulled out a forensics kit and started powdering dust on what glass remained, one like those camel-hair brushes that were popular in 1988 when retro shaving was the big to-do, and you could actually see the fingerprints. And I asked him, “Do you really think this will help you catch the guy?,” and he answered, “I dunno. I’ve never done this before,” and I could practically hear the wolves chasing the elk through the Garry Oak savannah, how far away from civilization we lived, and then I wondered how many times I must have stumbled drunk into this fire station, my handprints all over the goddamned building and phone, and imagined myself deported to Syria, giving up all my knowledge to help with the war on terror, but confused as to just how many Al-Qaeda we might capture using lyrics from Journey and REO Speedwagon.
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It’s just like that.
*obscure word of the day.
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