A Little Fuzzy: Part Eins

This May, it will have been twenty years since I graduated from Wartburg College.  It sounds like a long time, and, I guess in the average life span of an individual, a quarter of my life has been spent between that day and this one, but why does it seem like it was yesterday?  I'm not being figurative - it really does feel like....

Christine and I drove down I-380 from Cedar Rapids, Iowa on our way to Des Moines.  During the summer, the vast expanse of cornfields and beanfields create a green ocean across most of the Midwest.  As the wind rustles the top leaves and tassels of the corn plants, it looks like God is running his hand across them.  But in the winter, Eastern Iowa takes on a vastly different view: the contrast is stark and no more stark than this year: instead of tall banks of drifted snow, windblown topsoil creating dark, silted patterns in the pure white, there was a dry brown vista.  No snow had fallen and it seemed as if the entire visible world had fallen asleep and turned into a desert.

You forget what the slight wobble of the earth does when you live nearer the tropics.  As we turned west to head down I-80 towards Des Moines, I noticed the sun bustling through my window, but not in a baking-my-driving-arm way.  This wintertime Iowa that I'd forgotten reminded me that the sun liked to stay in bed in the mornings and then, at 4:00 in the afternoon, it would start to pull the blankets up over its head for a night long nap. 

The girls were in the back seat doing what they do best.  Reading the metric ton of books that we'd lugged from Australia and my parents'.  We had two hotel rooms.  The girls were sleeping in one room and the parents in the other.  Normally, this would be a moment where Barry White would start to croon.  We put the girls to bed at 6:00 to watch a movie and said, "Don't even think about coming next door unless there is a fire," we thought we'd watch one of the movies that we'd picked up for Christmas.

Talk about the airplane of love crash landing on the tarmac of bad cinema.  There are really bad movies in history: Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, Ishtar, Austin Powers 3: Goldmember, but this one was so bad, I can't even remember the name of it.  After it was finished, I looked at Christine and wondered how I could retrieve the last hours of my life while at the same time erasing the memory of what just went before our eyes. 

Needless to say, Barry White morphed into Betty White.

After brushing our teeth, we rolled into bed having nightmares about the scriptwriting that had assaulted our senses.  Such a nice bed.  It would have been so nice to sleep in the next morning.  It would have been...

BWOOOOOP! BWOOOP! BWOOOP!  When you are awakened suddenly, a person does all sorts of strange things.  Because it was six o'clock in the morning and the sun wouldn't make a cameo for at least two hours, I ran into the door frame, the closet, stubbed my toe against the table.  The TV stand became the world's largest hurdle because somewhere in our wonderful hotel, either by purpose or by accident someone had pulled the fire alarm.  Then, my words to the girls came into full effect, Do not come to our room for any reason except for a fire.

The fire alarms were raging.  If this were college, and I was living on Hebron III which was the dorm in which we lived, I would probably attempt to sleep through it.  The odds are, at that time and place twenty years ago, someone had stumbled in and thought it funny to get everyone out of bed.  But now, as a father of children in another hotel room, (albeit right next door) it was time to find them.  Quickly I threw on a shirt (inside out) shorts (backwards) and stumbled out the door to see if there was a raging Hyatt fire.  The lights were blinding in the hallway and next door I saw three young cubs emerging from their room in their pajamas.  They tried to shout to me, asking me what was going on, but all that I could remember was that we weren't supposed to take the elevator in times of fire. So, I gathered the three chicks under my wing, told Christine to meet us downstairs outside the hotel and then pulled the girls down the steps. 

Unfortunately, I forgot my hotel key.  I didn't realize that until it was too late.

I pushed the bar to open the emergency door and stepped outside.  As the sun had not yet risen, the frigid night air blasted us in the face and, unfortunately every other body part.  When you are awakened quickly you don't think about these things, but as we stood there, in -10 degree temperature (Celsius), barefooted and non-coated, I thought to myself, Nice one, Doorknob.  Out of the pan and into the icebox.  Your children are going to die of hypothermia instead of smoke inhalation.  I looked at the children standing cross-armed and shivering uncontrollably next to me and thought, Stuff this - I'm going back inside.  At least when the fire gets to us we can warm our hands and feet up.  I pulled on the door and, of course, it was locked.

Panic from the girls.  Nobody could even feel their feet anymore; no one else in the hotel had come to save themselves outside with us.  So, with numb feet, we tiptoed the two hundred yards from 'fire gathering area' and headed to the front doors.  I looked up and couldn't see smoke roiling from windows, so the odds are, if we got to the lobby and no one was screaming to head for the exits, we would be okay. 

If you were an outsider watching us, it might have been funny.  A father and three young girls, ouching their way around the outside of a hotel in the dark, in the cold... But for us, it was almost shameful, well, for me, that is.  How could I do this to the girls?

We entered the lobby and were greeted by panicked front desk staff.  So strange to see them staggering around downstairs in their Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer outfits calling the fire department to check out why in God's name the fire alarms are going off. 

What did we do?  We sat down and had coffee with the rest of the guests who were much calmer than I was.  Most of them had brought down their handbags, their iPads, valuables and, of course, their dogs and cats.  It was a scene that, if watched in slow motion, would have resembled Barnum and Bailey's Circus.  Sure enough, the firefighters came in, and after them I was waiting for the clowns and elephants.  I was tired, but surely this was much better entertainment than the movie we watched the night before.

Lastly, descending like a princess amidst the full geared firefighters, tossing her hair to the side and smiling like a supermodel, was my wife Christine.  She had grabbed the room card, dressed herself, brought coats and boots for the girls and anything else we might need for a four alarm fire.  She's always ready for anything.

Come on Barry White.  Keep Singing.

The trip from Iowa City to Des Moines seems like one of the longest on the planet.  Apart from the world's largest truck stop, there's not much to see.  And as we drove past that monstrous truck stop, I wondered what the next few days would bring.  I hadn't really spent much time with my college friends, the Warm Fuzzies, since the time we went to Canada about six years ago.  After twenty years, I was excited to see how life had changed and how life had not.  Des Moines is where we would meet them.

As I looked back at my girls reading in the back seat, I wondered just for a moment, what it will be like for them in College in a few years.

We pulled into Des Moines, found the hotel, and life turned back twenty years.