first response in life stuff and misc.

On the first of these awful anniversaries, in two-thousand-two, I was driving into work, my very first job after college, training as a 911 (the emergency line not the day) operator up in Herkimer. In the end, I was awful in that position. While I was skilled with phones and computers, I lacked the emotional composure at twenty-two to handle true emergencies, still do. One thing to answer a call from a little old lady asking if the fire department still came out to fill the swimming pools or wondering when the fireworks begin (“dusk” “when’s dusk?”) but quite another when death and life are in the balance. I’ll cop to that. Detachment isn’t my bailiwick. Some things are difficult to ever stop feeling, they linger on the wind.

I was training on the morning shift. Being young, I still ate carbs like that was my actual job, so I got into the line for the McDonalds drive-thru to order two egg sandwiches and one of those hash brown pucks they sold molten-hot. I believe they still do, I don’t know, in the ensuing years I got the diabetes, funny how decades fly upon that breeze, feeling like yesterdays.

It was a long line. It’s still one of the few places for drive-through breakfast in Herkimer, the line still ridiculous. I considered leaving but risked it for the biscuit and placed my order through the tinny microphone and waited, knowing while I’d cut it close, I wouldn’t be late. News reporters and shock jocks alike somberly explored what’d happened a year before but it was too much to bear, I put on a cassette, that’s how long ago it was.

When I finally pulled up to the window, the girl (she’s a girl within in my distant memories but probably only a year or three younger than I was at the time) just shrugged. “No charge, sir.” I froze. Did I know her? Then I looked down at my sleeves, the uniform a crispy blue dress-shirt with patches on the shoulders, I had been mistaken for an EMT, a first responder, the kind who could’ve died saving lives if he’d lived four hours south, one year before. Probably also why I was “sir”. I felt so damned guilty but the line was so long behind me, I knew arguing would just ruin twenty mornings behind me so I thanked her and I drove off. Closest I was to an EMT was keeping a belt cutter in the glove-box in case I flipped my car some awful Adirondack winter.

Though I was a clumsy accidental fraud, someone just wanted to say “thank you” through that haze of distant grief, that’s what counted. I hope it helped her feel like she’d been able to show her respect and remembrance, even though I was just some kid trying to learn how to answer a phone in a fashion that could give a person comfort. I burned the roof of my mouth, of course.

Last updated August 30, 2021