Putting out childhood fires.

His imagination was as hot as the imaginary fires that he put out with his bright red metal snorkel fire engine.

One of the worst fire disasters occurred one Saturday morning when he left the snorkel up, with his plastic yellow fireman in the basket, to put out the fire in their electric wall heater.

It was a roaring fire, 3 stacks wide.

It was the same stack electric wall heater that he would kneel in front of to dry his hair before the school bus came on cold winter mornings.

But while putting that stack heater fire out, he left for some other something that caught his young mind’s attention. A few minutes later he smelled hot plastic. Running back to the fire that he was originally supposed to be putting out before he got distracted, he found that the fire engine was ok but his plastic yellow fireman was now a plastic yellow glob sitting in the bottom of the snorkel basket.

Sad and disgusted at his failure as a fireman he put the fire engine away in the back of his closet to get a grip with killing his only plastic fireman.

Putting out fires stopped.

Then life happened.

And like life does happen, if we’re lucky, we grow up and we grow old.

After his parents died, he found what was left of his once-perfect bright red fire engine in their attic.

He took the fire engine home to decide its future.

The old man can still hear the motor as he proudly drives it up and down the hall with the fancy wired battery remote control. He would occasionally stop in bedrooms and bathrooms to save lives, put our fires and rescue imaginary cats off of countertops they’d crawled up to and couldn’t get down.

The bright red snorkel fire engine is now very old, it’s not as good as it once was.

But it’s still in one piece, not in nearly as good of shape as it once was and it has made some fantastic memories in its life.

And so it turns out that the old man and his old metal red snorkel fire engine now have a lot in common.

Indeed.