SMOKE ALARM!

Let's take a break from sifting through my elementary school neuroses to chat a minute about some more current psychological scarring, shall we?

Today, our smoke alarms malfunctioned.  If it were just me here, this would be a minor irritation handled with several shouted F-bombs and perhaps a beer as a reward for fixing the problem.  But it's not just me.  There is O, my 23-month-old son who is obsessed with identifying the causes of all unidentified noises and then soliciting blood oaths that they will not happen again, and E, my 4-month-old who is in his third day of a grueling "sleep training" regimen, which is really just me turning the volume down on his baby monitor at night and encouraging him to tough it out as much as possible.  They are young; they are maybe a little more fragile than usual right now.  These are not seasoned combat veterans accustomed to range fire or Gitmo prisoners used to having piercing noises blasted at them randomly, is what I'm saying.

Anyway, we were having a peaceful morning.  O and I had weeded the front yard (which means I weeded, O threw yard refuse as close to the street as he dared before I caught him) with E napping in monitor range.  Just as we were getting ready for the shift change when O finishes lunch, reads stories, and goes down for a nap and E wakes up-- a delicate exercise in timing that, if accomplished PERFECTLY can sometimes buy me a 20-minute nap (maybe 15% of the time)--a piercing series of beeps issued from the ceiling and soon picked up in every other room of the house.  Evidently, we have an "integrated system," which sounds all new-fangled and desirable until you realize it actually means "sudden, cascading, multi-person deafness."

Seriously.  I remember smoke alarms from my youth, and from every single place I've lived since.  When they needed a battery, they chirped politely, albeit annoyingly, and you went room to room trying to hunt down the offending unit, replaced the battery or ripped the damn thing down and you were done.  This "integrated system" is an entirely different animal.  As I discovered during a frantic Google search with both boys now fully awake and howling (O was actually trying to stuff small handfuls of macaroni in his ears to stop the pain), this system is infinitely LOUDER and MORE SOPHISTICATED.  It could be pissed off at any number of things, including carbon monoxide, fire, or heat (this is the middle of the desert-- a heat alarm?  Really?).  All the alarms are linked through the house's wiring, and like a hot-tempered family, if one goes off, they all join in.

Being the modern woman that I am, I went for the low tech solution first, jabbing the business end of a broom into anything remotely button-like on the closest alarm.  While this worked well in the hallway and the boys' rooms, the vaulted ceilings in the living room and master bedroom proved far trickier and required several increasingly frantic hops with dead aim.  Luckily, I happen to have freakish dead aim with all projectiles when I am Hulk mad.  This approach bought blessed silence for about as long as it takes to get halfway through an explanation to a two-year-old of what the hell a smoke alarm is.  This while trying to nurse the infant who periodically releases his latch to resume screaming, thus causing me to shoot milk directly into his face, and trying to maintain an FM calmness to my voice that I did not feel at all.  Then--

BEEP BEEP BEEP!  BEEP BEEP BEEP!

"AAAAAARRRRRRGHHHH!!! EARS HURT!  MOMMY, STOP BEEPS! AAAAAAARRRGGGHHHH!!!"

Again with the jabbing, again with the nursing and the soothing voice.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  I begin to wonder if there actually is a fire somewhere, perhaps a tiny one hidden way up in the walls, or else miles away and the "integrated system" is powerful enough to sniff it out even though all my human senses say otherwise.  Finally, macaroni all over the kitchen floor, E soaked in milk and suffering a fit of hiccups, I surrender and hunt down an 800 number on the website and begin ushering my family onto the back porch.  A recording warms me that I should be prepared to recite the model name and number of the product I'm calling about, and asks me to enter a number to differentiate what type of integrated system I have.  I growl, mash the first number I can reach, and go back to herding.  The customer service rep who answers advises me over the howling maw of chaos how I must identify the faulty unit and dismantle its wiring harness.

Check.  Back inside, I find it.  Of course: the master bedroom one, the vaulted ceiling.  O refuses to step foot back in the deafness chamber his house has become, so I leave him crying on the porch and dump E in his swing, run to garage, and wrestle our giant ten-foot ladder back inside.  Up close, the noise is a stunning force, a wall, a fist punching the delicate little crumbs of bones that used to enable me to hear.  I remember, for a brief, insane moment, a story I'd read about how riot police were testing new non-violent methods of crowd control and found ridiculously loud bonks of directed noise effective.

I rip the smoke alarm from its mount and rake my fingers through the wiring bundles stuffed up inside the drywall until I find the one I'm looking for and wrench it free with a satisfying yank.  O has stumbled inside, drawn by the spectacle of the ladder, and stands shaking, asking muddled questions about firemen and a character from one of his stories who gets stuck in a tree and requires a ladder to get back down.  I collect him gently into my lap, figuring now is a good moment to "process" what happened.  I hand him the prize of the beheaded fire alarm, silent now, and get halfway through an explanation of faulty wiring and then--

BEEP BEEP BEEP!!!  BEEP BEEP BEEP!!!

Baby and toddler freak out anew (it's actually kind of amazing the number of times you can be unpleasantly surprised in the same exact way) and I snatch up the broom, thinking I've killed the wrong alarm and dart from room to room looking for the next victim, only now I've lost all directional hearing and can't tell where the beeps are coming from.  It's only when I pick up the dead unit and hold it directly next to my ear, causing something to actually, no shit, rattle inside my head, that I realize it's this same unit going off.  I grab it and run outside again (isolate it!  Separate it from the boys!  Throw yourself on the grenade!) and, officially beyond reason and resorting to the lower ape portion of my brain, I slam it into the concrete a couple of times before an idea occurs to me.  A chill runs down my spine as I see the twist any good horror movie is sure to include when its beast refuses to die: It has batteries.  As a back up in case the power goes out.  And get this: the latch to the battery compartment is a tricky little thing that requires multiple points of counter pressure, like a god damned prescription pill bottle.

Another call to the 800 number as I encourage O to take the battery out into the back yard and throw it far, far away.  He relishes this, and I see him run at breakneck speed down the pathway and huck the battery clear into the rose bush, yelling, "NO BATTERIES!  NO FIRE!  BEEPING ALL DONE!  NO MORE!" Back inside as I talk to the customer service rep, O cautiously approaches the now gutted alarm and fingers the scuff marks on its face.  His eyes glitter.  For the remainder of the evening, he hauls the alarm around with him, a carcass, a slain foe, a severed head to mount on the parapet as a warning to all other unexplained noises: THIS IS WHAT WE WILL DO TO YOU.

Amen, little man.  I've got a claim number and warranty instructions for getting a replacement unit, but I think O's trophy kill was a way more satisfying resolution.

Third Grade

Ah, here we go: welcome to the year my anxiety level skyrocketed so much that I no longer stood out to my teachers for charm and sass and was instead recognized right away for being wound a bit too tightly.  Case in point-- this was the year I socked a perfectly lovely boy, my best friend, Grant, right in the mouth at the school lunch table for having the gall to kiss me on the cheek.  Just to further illustrate how perfectly inoffensive, and in all ways tender Grant was, he later grew up to attend the University of Texas at the same time I was there, and after evidently spending weeks being too shy to approach me, finally did and revealed that he played the guitar, and was majoring in Humanities or Philosophy (something soul-searching and profound, I recall, while my own was "fucking English-- I'm going to be so useless.")  He was also teaching blind kids to swim, which I found out by running into him at a local pool since again, he was too classy to mention this, and oh, he was also incredibly hot.  This is the kind of guy I punched.

The Grant-punching incident led directly to my third grade teacher, Mrs. Garcia, taking me aside one day to explain to me that I needed to "hang loose" like a monkey.  To illustrate this concept, a couple of days later she brought me a neon green stuffed monkey doll with overly long arms and velcro on its hands so it could hug a variety of different things, including me.  Evidently I was the kind of kid whose potent anxiety haunts you and follows you to the toy store.  I've always remembered that act of kindness, but unfortunately, I think Mrs. Garcia would look at me tonight and shake her head: I am on my third glass of wine and am trying to figure out why my type A fighter pilot husband can't seem to understand why I feel that being a stay-at-home mom and non-writing writer puts us on unequal footing in all questions financial.  How's that for a rhetorical bomb?  Bla-DOW!  Moving on... third grade now making all kinds of sense...

The nightmare of my teeth continued this year, and on a family outing, I fell over a small waterfall and got washed a ways downriver, prompting a breathless retelling in sober reporter-voice in an essay prompt at school.  I was beginning to get strokes for my writing by this time, and had set my heart briefly on being some kind of evening news anchor, so I peppered the account liberally with terms like "allegedly" and "quote, unquote" written out just like that.  I couldn't figure out what made Mrs. Garcia laugh about my tales from the front lines of personal disaster, but I figured it at least proved she was listening, even if she was incapable of truly understanding the danger I had faced.

Fourth grade's up next: the year I had a teacher named after an improvised prison weapon, Ms. Shank, and boy, did she live up to the idea of sudden retribution.  Also: hello, crippling math anxiety!

What do you remember from third grade?