stops me from applying it to the hood of my car.
The sticker becomes a firehouse joke: not just at my firehouse, but at the two other firehouses in the neighboring towns. I am the New Girl with the BIG Sticker. And, to my chagrin, the huge sticker is visible to every person in the world but the cops, who still refuse to recognize my legitimate presence at an accident.
“Nice sticker on your car,” guffaws Bob Withall, a Wilton town cop. “It looks like the landing pad for the Life Star helicopter.”
I am in love with my sticker and leave it on despite the razzing. Like the owner of an American Express Platinum Card, I am convinced that it commands “worldwide respect.”
I walk around the town and go grocery-shopping in my fireman’s coat. It is as spanking new as its owner. I wear it to a meeting of a women’s group that I belong to. I hear hushed whispering. I think people are in awe of my new affiliation, the fact that I am now officially a member of a fire department. I swell with pride. When I get home there is a message on my phone machine from a good friend. “Jane, if we didn’t like you so much we wouldn’t say anything, but we are afraid that someone sold you a fireman’s jacket as a winter coat.”
Sooner or later it had to happen, and it happens sooner: my tone goes off and I am on my way to a real accident. Two things go wrong straightaway. First I get on the two-way police radio and give Bernice’s call number instead of mine. She has already signed on the call, and so the dispatcher is surprised when someone else identifying herself as G-56 signs on a minute later. My mistake dawns on me and I correct myself. “I mean G-65,” I say, and then commit the worst possible breach of police radio etiquette, which is to start apologizing and chattering away.
To say one word more than necessary on air is to be at the very bottom rung of spankerhood, a fool. One is supposed to act like Joe Friday of
Dragnet
on the radio, not some yenta on her home telephone.
After I have screwed up my first radio transmission, I realize I am out of the driveway, blue lights flashing, driving eighty miles an hour, and I have no idea where I am going. I have lived in this town for more then twenty years and have not once noticed the name of any street other than the one I live on. Like most people who live in a fairly rural place, I know the roads but not any of their names, and I know who lives where but not their formal addresses. Now I have to find the road by its official name, the house by its “numeric,” then figure out how to park near enough to the house to drag all my stuff inside but not so near that I block the space where the ambulance will pull in.
I am a symphony of missteps. I am trying to put on my rubber gloves as I drive, look at the map issued to me by the department, and drive faster. I am a worse accident waiting to happen than the one I’m going to. It is ten at night with no moon. I can’t read the map because I have forgotten my reading glasses, I am swerving all over the road, I keep clicking the transmission button on the radio, to the palpable irritation of the dispatcher, and asking for directions—another cardinal sin. One is expected to know the roads of the town by heart.
I find the house. I throw on my EMT jacket, grab my jump kit, and run to the front door. Bernice and the rest of the crew have gone to the firehouse to pick up the ambulance. I am the first one on the scene.
The call is for a seventy-four-year-old lady who has fallen. I arrive at the front door on this chilly winter night in a sweat. I must look frantic. Personally I wouldn’t allow me in the door. The lady’s son ushers me in. “My mother tripped,” he says. “She caught her foot on the bed frame and fell. I think she has broken her hip.” I am shown the way upstairs to the tidy bedroom. A large crucifix hangs over the bed. In the room there is a knitting project under way, what looks like an Irish
The sticker becomes a firehouse joke: not just at my firehouse, but at the two other firehouses in the neighboring towns. I am the New Girl with the BIG Sticker. And, to my chagrin, the huge sticker is visible to every person in the world but the cops, who still refuse to recognize my legitimate presence at an accident.
“Nice sticker on your car,” guffaws Bob Withall, a Wilton town cop. “It looks like the landing pad for the Life Star helicopter.”
I am in love with my sticker and leave it on despite the razzing. Like the owner of an American Express Platinum Card, I am convinced that it commands “worldwide respect.”
I walk around the town and go grocery-shopping in my fireman’s coat. It is as spanking new as its owner. I wear it to a meeting of a women’s group that I belong to. I hear hushed whispering. I think people are in awe of my new affiliation, the fact that I am now officially a member of a fire department. I swell with pride. When I get home there is a message on my phone machine from a good friend. “Jane, if we didn’t like you so much we wouldn’t say anything, but we are afraid that someone sold you a fireman’s jacket as a winter coat.”
Sooner or later it had to happen, and it happens sooner: my tone goes off and I am on my way to a real accident. Two things go wrong straightaway. First I get on the two-way police radio and give Bernice’s call number instead of mine. She has already signed on the call, and so the dispatcher is surprised when someone else identifying herself as G-56 signs on a minute later. My mistake dawns on me and I correct myself. “I mean G-65,” I say, and then commit the worst possible breach of police radio etiquette, which is to start apologizing and chattering away.
To say one word more than necessary on air is to be at the very bottom rung of spankerhood, a fool. One is supposed to act like Joe Friday of
Dragnet
on the radio, not some yenta on her home telephone.
After I have screwed up my first radio transmission, I realize I am out of the driveway, blue lights flashing, driving eighty miles an hour, and I have no idea where I am going. I have lived in this town for more then twenty years and have not once noticed the name of any street other than the one I live on. Like most people who live in a fairly rural place, I know the roads but not any of their names, and I know who lives where but not their formal addresses. Now I have to find the road by its official name, the house by its “numeric,” then figure out how to park near enough to the house to drag all my stuff inside but not so near that I block the space where the ambulance will pull in.
I am a symphony of missteps. I am trying to put on my rubber gloves as I drive, look at the map issued to me by the department, and drive faster. I am a worse accident waiting to happen than the one I’m going to. It is ten at night with no moon. I can’t read the map because I have forgotten my reading glasses, I am swerving all over the road, I keep clicking the transmission button on the radio, to the palpable irritation of the dispatcher, and asking for directions—another cardinal sin. One is expected to know the roads of the town by heart.
I find the house. I throw on my EMT jacket, grab my jump kit, and run to the front door. Bernice and the rest of the crew have gone to the firehouse to pick up the ambulance. I am the first one on the scene.
The call is for a seventy-four-year-old lady who has fallen. I arrive at the front door on this chilly winter night in a sweat. I must look frantic. Personally I wouldn’t allow me in the door. The lady’s son ushers me in. “My mother tripped,” he says. “She caught her foot on the bed frame and fell. I think she has broken her hip.” I am shown the way upstairs to the tidy bedroom. A large crucifix hangs over the bed. In the room there is a knitting project under way, what looks like an Irish
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