Fire!

My Dad has done a bunch of cool stuff - worked for the government in a secure site inside a giant mountain, made papier mache pigs for the Chicago Field Museum, worked with the USAID project in Cairo, run a trucking business more or less by accident, run a record store with my Mom called Square Records. This basically means he has a story for every occasion and would decimate the trivia world if he ever decided to join a bar trivia league.

Among these stories is one about his time as a volunteer firefighter in Yellow Springs, OH while attending Antioch College. While he volunteered for the Antioch fire department, they responded to a fire in some pretty serious weather. They basically wound up driving down a road with every bird in the county hauling ass the other direction to get out of the way of a tornado, watching the sky go absolutely pitch black in a matter of minutes and be really, really scary. As I remember, they didn't wind up having to go too too close to the tornado, but it was a near thing and they were certainly close enough for everyone to need to change their pants when they got back to the station.

I think it's cool to consider and see your parents as kids, and to know about the cool stuff they have done. It's even better when your parents' friends from their youth tag them in old scanned pictures on Facebook.

My Dad is the one doing some kind of James Dean As Brooding Fireman routine; kneeling in the right side foreground with his chin in his hand.

When I told him about these pictures, he proudly told me that he was the one who got the funky patterns painted on the doors. Those who know my parents know my Mom as the crafty artistic one...sort of an interesting illustration of the complexity of people, no?