Idiosycratic Life

Fire in the Hole....

While I was little, my dad would play a game with Amanda and I called "Fire in the Hole." It mostly consisted of my dad taking turns holding us close, down by his hip, then shouting "Fire in the Hole!" and tossing us in the air. One of my favorite childhood photos of my dad and me is a picture of us in our old house on State Street playing this game. I was probably 3, and I'm holding Lovey (security blacket extraordinaire- then still extremely recognizable as a bed sheet) and my hair, which was pretty long for a toddler, is all splayed out in every direction and we're really laughing.

Today somebody called in a bomb threat to City Hall and left a PVC pipe with styrofoam sticking out of it on the sidewalk outside. They brought in the whole critical response team and this guy put on body armor and walked this big bomb detecter detonator thingy down to it and hooked it up and then came back to the bomb unit truck. They send some kind of charge down a long wire which somehow determines if its a real bomb and makes it safe to remove, I guess.... and there was this really tense moment before they sent the charge down the wire and they shouted, "Fire in the Hole!" and everything else was really, really quiet until the boom of the disabling charge went off.

It turned out the "bomb" was a fake, a false alarm, and they took down the police tape, and I went on to shoot a story about a hot dog stand guy, but then I heard about Yale, and it reminded me of the anthrax day, the day lots of places, including Planned Parenthood in York, all got anthrax letters.....