Little Stories: The Fire Chief and the Bedroom Door
Plus a Lowen's Pharmacy sign update!
Little Stories, focusing on memories from my youth, is a recurring feature of Inconspicuous Consumption. You can see more Little Stories here.
When I was in second or third grade — this would have been roughly 1972 — the chief of our local fire department came to our school and talked to my class about fire safety. One thing he stressed was that people should always sleep with their bedroom door closed. That way, he explained, you’d be safer if there was a fire in another part of the house. (The snappy slogan shown above hadn’t yet been coined, but the fire chief’s basic message was the same.)
In those days, when I was about eight years old, I always slept with my bedroom door open. I had never really thought about it one way or the other, but leaving the door open let me see the hallway just outside my bedroom, and that hallway led to my parents’ room, so seeing the hallway was probably comforting to me on some level. Also, I hadn’t yet developed any sense of privacy or territoriality, so closing the door to create my own domain had frankly never occurred to me.
When I went to bed that night, I initially left the door open like I usually did. But then I remembered what the fire chief had said, so I got out of bed, shut the door, and climbed back into bed.