Where There Is Smoke

A week or so ago, I asked Luca if he knew what to do if the fire alarm went off in our house.

He said, “Sure. I sit in the hall and wait for my other classmates and then our teacher takes us outside and we count heads.”

Wait, no. That’s not how…never mind.

If you’ll recall from past seasons of HamannEggs, Luca used to be crazily obsessed with Firemen. We would watch hours of this insane Welsh TV show called “Fireman Sam” and you were guaranteed to step on at least 2.5 fire trucks on your way to the bathroom every night.

So you can imagine how disappointed he was when he was told he slept through firemen stomping all over our house the other night.

I awoke at 3am to someone clunking around in the dark. I thought to myself, “Really? Another burglar? I just installed that stupid alarm system (after letting it sit in its box for 8 months).”  After arming myself with a pair of boxer shorts, I discovered Diana walking around our house, sniffing.

Sniff. Sniff. Something was burning. Not burning burning, but there was a faint scent of plastic or electricity. Or something. But we couldn’t see any smoke. And our detectors were silent.

Through sniff detective work, we figured out the smell was coming from our front room. But it wasn’t that strong. We felt the walls because isn’t that what you are supposed to do? We also felt the electrical sockets. But I couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on.

Diana and I just looked at each other. What were we going to do? Go to sleep and wake up in the middle of an inferno? Call the fire department and have them smash our walls with their axes?

Because we are responsible for not killing our sons, we went the ax route.

Within 3 minutes (we live in upper middle class white suburbia), we had the surprisingly young Chief of the Evanston Fire Department clomping around our house.

They poked around the house with a device that looked like those things that told the soldiers they were about to get eaten in James Cameron’s “Aliens.”

The Chief went so far as to open Luca’s door, clomp around and say rather loudly, “He sleeps through everything, huh?”  Luca just slept, dreaming of one day getting to meet a real life fireman.

In the end, we discovered the culprit was a burnt out ceiling fan motor. 

The next morning, Luca learned we had real life firemen in our house. I told him they were also joined by Darth Vader and the Transformers and his stuffed animals were briefly alive.