22h55-23h59, 11-March-2013
There must be no less than twelve things I would rather be doing right now than sitting down to write. Should I list them? Huh? Should I?
I have spent a lot of time driving down Iceland’s Route 1 lately, and like any good highway it has the power in its more mundane straighaways to trigger unexpected thoughts and recollections. For instance, today just after shooting past some outlet glacier tongue of Vatnajökull whose name I have no prayer of ever remembering I found myself dwelling on the latter half of the summer of 1986, when circumstance (and a lightning bolt) finally put ‘Paid’ to a long-held (self-diagnosed) neurosis of mine.
My obsessive fear of house fires began in 1971, immediately after being shown a Walt Disney/Donald Duck cartoon on fire prevention in the 1st Grade during a school assembly (along with at least one other short film on the subject, one that did NOT involve familiar animated characters and was thus a whole heckuva lot scarier). I vividly recall going home that day and immediately checking our basement for oily rags that could spontaneously combust. Also, that night — and countless other nights over the ensuing 15 years — found me lying awake waiting for my parents to turn out their light so I could sneak out of bed to make sure (1) the stove was turned off, (2) that there were no live cigarette embers in the ashtrays strewn throughout the house, and (3) that neither Mom nor Dad had fallen asleep in bed with a lit cigarette between their fingers. The fact is, all thanks for my being the quintessential “night owl” today should probably be set at the webbed feet of Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
Time passes. We move from a house in Hoffman Estates, IL USA (3rd story room, a 30-foot drop) to a house in Richardson, TX USA (2nd story room, window egress to a sea of concrete) to a house in Plano, TX USA (a ground-level room, and a breath exhalation held for nearly six years). I continue to make my tiptoe rounds each night, though, having added fireplace cinder waiting-out and door lock confirmation to my routine (the latter likely tied to Dad’s having made a career shift into the sale of home security systems).
More time. More moves (a subject for other days)…and more ground floor bedrooms. All good. College begins, and full-time residency with the parents comes to an end without my perishing in a blaze brought to ferocious life by a shoddy-wiring-and-insullation cocktail or the superheated creosote of a poorly-cleaned chimney. And of course I am aware that university dormitories come complete with up-to-code fire escape routes and evacuation plans.
And that’s all we have time for today, folks. Do tune in tomorrow, though, for the conclusion of this episode of…”Route 1 Reminiscing”!