Fire Drill

Last night a fire drill was conducted at my grandparents’ assisted living home. Ten minutes before the drill, a staff member had entered the recreation room where we were eating Pizza Hut supreme thin crust and announced, apologetically, that the room would be crammed with all of the home’s residents in about ten minutes. I wondered, but did not inquire, why the residents would go to an enclosed space and not evacuate the building if everything was going up in flames. We hurriedly finished our pizza and sat nervously in my grandparents’ sitting room, like the devout checking their watches for the Apocalypse.

Sure enough, the alarms began shrieking just a few minutes later. Even though I knew it was a drill, there was something terrible in that sound, in my grandfather finding his cane, my grandmother locating her walker, my father thrusting open the door. It had suddenly become an emergency. Out in the hall, residents streamed to the designated room, moving surprisingly quickly, wincing at the wailing alarms.

Inside the room, the air changed to one of convivial after-church chatter. One resident was teased for already being in her nightgown. Another reminisced about a tornado alarm, when the lights had gone out. Then the cry went up: “Where’s Catherine?” Catherine, it turned out, was in the hallway, bored by the proceedings, already trying to get back to her room.

I sat between my grandparents. Something about the obedient waiting reminded me of being little, sitting between them at Hope Lutheran Church, down the road from their old farmhouse, thinking about the cookies my grandmother would bring out after lunch: Buckeyes with a creamy peanut butter filling; wreaths made of cornflakes, melted marshmallows, and red hots, if it was getting close to Christmas.

The sirens abruptly stopped and the staff spoke sternly into walkie talkies, then gave us the all clear. We wandered back to my grandparents’ room and collapsed on the sofa, giddy at having survived an imaginary disaster. My grandfather began speaking about the history of slaughtering in Henry County; how his father had done it, how he had done it, how my cousin did it now. The shift from each generation – the advances in technology, and with it, the diminishing of that knowledge, the intimate grasp of life cycles under your own roof, transforming your livestock into your livelihood with your own hand. My grandfather spoke proudly of my cousin’s beef cattle, the grain they’re fed on, the quality of the meat. Skills and secrets unknown to me, in my cordoned-off city life in Berlin. An hour later, my parents and I hugged my grandparents goodbye. They walked us to the lobby, waved as we headed to the car.

We strode across the parking lot, the stars shining hard. The fire drill was over, the Thanksgiving visit nearing an end. What had we been practicing as we waited in that small room together, willing the alarm to subside?