Some things are easily forgotten:  people’s phone numbers, perhaps, or maybe the location of your keys, or even the reason you went to the store this morning. But for whatever reason, the glue that usually sticks a memory to the mind wears out, and we are left with the broken, half-shattered remnants of an event.  This particular time, however, is not one of those tattered remains, but a full out superglue-d bit of my own history, and it involves a man whom most people believe is a toothless, gristle-skinned dinosaur.

Fourth of July, 1985.  I was eight at the time, holding a dozen sparklers in my hand, trying to convince my mother and father that it’s safe for me to use them all simultaneously.  They don’t buy it, of course; what mother and father would?  But they allow me four, two in each hand, and I am happy, jumping and frolicking in the smoke-filled air.  It’s a little late, about eight or so at night, when my parents have finally had enough of the snapping and popping sounds, and they invite us children back into the house for some fresh-cut watermelon.

After a well-eaten dessert, my brethren and I are shooed off to bed, and we sit around, listening to the bottle rockets and sky screamers and roman candles whistling on their journey into the sky.  My little brother William is the first to fall asleep; at five years old, he didn’t have the training that eight years of life gives you.  My older brothers, Mike and Sean, clock out soon after, because at 10 and 13, you’ve already learned that the Fourth of July comes every year, and that explosions aren’t as good as a well-deserved sleep.  Me, I lie there, savoring the taste of watermelon and the few pieces of pear that I snagged from the fridge, enjoying life as only a small child can.

The doorbell rings, and at first, I’m annoyed – it’s almost ten by now, and my little brother is snoring away.  Meanwhile, my older brothers are waking up, wondering as I am what that strange crackling noise is.  The door to our bedroom slams open, and my father screams, “Get out of the house!  NOW!”

“Why, Dad?” I ask, while rubbing my eyes and yawning.

“JUST GO, NOW!” he bellowed back, before running up the flight of stairs leading to the upstairs apartment.  As I slowly got up from my bed, I heard the reason loud and clear.

“Fire in the backyard!  Get out of the house!” my father was screaming at the family upstairs.

A fire…  now that changed my outlook on waking up significantly.  I rushed out of the front door, still in my pajamas, and ran two blocks down to the only pull station I knew of.  I pulled the handle as I had been taught to do in school, and waited very impatiently for the operator to respond.

“Where is the fire located?”  That was the first intelligible response from the box.  It sounded like a hollowed telephone, with a strangely robotic hint to it.

“74-11 97^th Avenue!  Please, hurry!  It’s my house on fire!”  Amazingly, I was pretty calm for a kid thinking he’s going to be homeless any minute.

“We’re sending a truck now.”

At that, I turned around, and was amazed to find that the fire truck was already there.  So was a crowd of people, and a lot of flickering light.  ‘Wow, they’re good!’ I thought to myself, and started walking back, confident that the firefighters knew what to do.

After the first block back, though, I started hearing something really peculiar. And then, as I got halfway through the second block, I saw something I never imagined possible.  There, in the middle of the street, were six or seven firefighters.  They looked to be concentrating on something in the middle of them, and what it was I really couldn’t see.  Then, it happened again.  Like a rag doll, I saw another fireman go flying through the air, at least four feet off the ground, to land not so nimbly on his feet and hands.  Determined, he rushed back to help his colleagues with whatever it was in the middle of them.

As I got closer, however, it became clear what (or really, who) it was inside the circle of flying firefighters.  It became alarmingly clear, because I heard something I had never ever heard before.  My father, perhaps the gruffest man I had ever met, was screaming, half-crying, at the top of his lungs, “MY SON IS IN THERE!!!”  

“DAD!” I yelled, and ran to him.  He turned, flipped all the firemen to the floor at once and ran to me, and yelled in the loudest possible voice, “DON’T EVER RUN AWAY LIKE THAT AGAIN!  DON’T EVER DISAPPEAR LIKE THAT!”  And then, he hugged me.  

Now, most people would think that’s a standard logical response, to hug your child, but my father was never one to accede to emotions.  It had never occurred to me, not once during the eight years of my life, that my father had ever cared for me until just that moment.  My father was stern.  Powerful.  He was for so many years a god to me.  But never, not once, was he the hugging type.  He was just my father.  Dad was just the name we had all given him, but after that night, Dad was exactly what he was.

I must have forgotten some parts of that night; my life has progressed quite a bit since that day.  Maybe I’m not positive on which words my dad screamed at the firemen as they flew away from him.  I might even be totally wrong about how far away that pull box was, or how it sounded.  But never in the eighteen years since that day have I ever forgotten the sight of my father tossing seven firefighters through the air just because he thought that I might be hurt.  Never once have I ever forgotten he’s my dad.