Hard to be Both

chirp

The first time you hear it, you’re never sure. Is that what I think it is? I am, of course awake, listening to the winter wind and rain pound the side of the house, wishing I could sleep. My mind, wanders aimlessly as I wait.

chirp

Yes. Yes it is. The smoke alarm. The one in the hallway. That ridiculous relic of 1970’s-era technology. Why do we still need smoke alarms?

I remember my childhood best friend, a spunky redhead named Sharon Sue, solemnly showing me a a collapsible ladder she kept under the bed of her second-floor room. Its box had a picture of a blond woman in her quilted bathrobe, clutching a toddler and climbing down the ladder from a window with flames shooting out of it, a fireman with sideburns waiting for her on the ground below.

The danger of fire somehow seemed real then in a way it doesn’t now. Especially in soggy Portland where everyone in my house (except occasionally the dog) sleeps on the ground floor within inches of a window.

chirp

Nice. Not quite loud enough to wake my sleeping husband but just enough to keep me from drifting off, back to sleep.

I know. One is supposed to replace the batteries of these ridiculous smoke alarms every year. But it seems wasteful to change out a battery before it’s done and, frankly, I’m lazy.

It’s only a matter of time before smoke alarms will seem quaint. Soon we’ll all live in smart houses with brilliant appliances and high-speed everything. The house won’t need a fire alarm because it will know better than to actually catch on fire.

chirp

I mean, I downloaded the new Firefox today and found the whole process rather cumbersome even though the download was snappy and the install painless. I mean shouldn’t my laptop just know there’s a new version of my browser and do all that on it’s own?

Then I start thinking about shrink-wrapped boxes of software on the shelves of stores like CompUSA. Yes, smoke detectors are going the way of shrink wrap. Yes, the way, as they say, of the poor, flightless Dodo.

chirp!

Is it getting more insistent. And annoying.

I picture getting up, dragging a chair over to the floor beneath my bane and reaching up to wrench it off the ceiling, opening the back door and tossing it outside. Yes, I suppose I could just replace the battery, but the chances of me figuring out how to take out the old one, let alone locating the proper replacement battery somewhere in the house are about equal with the odds of me, oh I don’t know, becoming a celebrated opera singer.

But I have to do something. So I wake up Mike. He gets up, pees, and stands listening in the middle of the room. For at least a minute.

The chirping, it seems, has stopped on its own.