My mother was very healthy and much alive in January 1993 when I saved the children from the house fire.
My first wife was a schoolteacher at the local school and I had a six year old son.
I was 34 years old driving my almost new pickup to be the night watchmen in the parking lot at the local Masonic lodge where a lot of my wife’s Eastern Star friends were hosting a sleep over for teenaged Rainbow Girls, and I was to relieve a WW2 veteran to take the midnight till dawn shift.
You drive along through this life never thinking that just one moment, may change somebody else’s life forever.
If I’d left five minutes early, to the Masonic Temple those three kids would have burned up in that home.
Five minutes later, and they’d have burned up, the same.
As it was I almost missed a turn preoccupied with something I’ve now forgotten and almost went one block down to make another right turn, but as I braked and made a right hand turn off our Main Street in town I noticed that a two story house on the corner still had Christmas lights on a Christmas tree lit in late January which struck me as odd.
I kept looking at the lower right side window of that two story house, and realized those weren’t Christmas lights, it was a small fire under a Christmas tree.
The windows up above were all dark, as was the room where the little fire was burning, under a Christmas tree in late January.
The carpet under the tree was feeding the fire, which doubled and then doubled again as I stood in the street beside my new pick up, door open.
I thought if I run in there I might put it out.
But running in a dark home in Missouri is an extremely good way to get shot by a homeowner.
So I stood there in the street yelling
WAKE UP YOIR HOUSE IS ON FIRE!
As I yelled the room burst into flames as the fire ignited the curtains.
Just then a light in the upper left side of the home turned on.
I ran up on the sidewalk, and a little girl, a taller little boy, and behind them a teenaged boy came out the front door.
In just that time, the fire on the right lower side was an inferno.
The oldest boy, maybe 16, said he wanted to go back inside to get his shoes and I screamed at him there’s nothing in that house worth dying for, get your ass on the lawn with the others.
Any illusions I had to play fireman were long over, as we watched the stairway they’d went down engulf in flames as the window in the room where the fire started burst from the heat and the house just became a wall of flame to look inside the open doorway.
They would have died that night, if I’d not timed my trip perfectly.
When I told my mother, she was delighted I’d saved the kids but not so happy I lied to preserve their mother’s reputation.
But bye and bye she decided I’d done the best I could, under the circumstances, and sang me this old song.
Most of life, is like those old songs.
pipedia.org
www.pipephil.eu
