Let's just talk for a minute about why those fire alarms scared me to the point of catatonia:

The first conditioning came from when I was but a wee little scamp, toddling around my father's workshop in the frigid cold of a Minnesota winter. I could really tear around, and within moments had lapped the sawdust filled room so many times my dad said that his head was spinning.

He picked me up and put me in the nest of blankets he had in a corner for our Shepard mutt, Ginger. She was excited to snuggle up to another warm living thing and wrapped her front paws around me and licked my face with great enthusiasm.

Thinking he could now get some work done, a common misconception among all new parents, his eyes left me and the dog and focused on some project or another.

I bolted up from the cozy slurp-fest and ran towards the space heater, which was center stage behind the band saw. It was one of those heaters they would never sell today. Wildly unsafe and a fire/explosion waiting to happen, it was cylindrical, metal, glowing red on the end, with a powerful fan blasting dry super-heated air into the shop.

It was beautiful, the only warm thing in the room. The furnace was having trouble keeping up with the wind chill from outside, and my dad kept the ancient space heater around for taking the edge off. Of course I went straight for it. The hot side was the color of molten lava, and its fan was my siren cry. I reached out and placed my tiny finger on the orange cone of heat. I watched as my fingertip melted onto the surface. Then the pain registered.

All hell broke loose.

I opened my mouth and screamed in slow motion. The dog jumped straight up out of her grungy little blanket snarl and bayed. My father's eyes got enormous and the blood drained from his face as he knocked over the saw table to get to me.

I don't really remember anything after that. It's safe to say that my mother was consulted, the dog was shut in the bathroom, and sedatives were administered. The hospital was no doubt called, and ice cubes wrapped in frayed brown towels were probably my best friends. Blame was assigned and anger was deflected for the first in a long series of dramas my parents starred in, called "Oh yeah, well whose fault do you think THAT is?"

And my little fingerprint is still grilled onto the end cone of that space heater, a shadow burned into the wall of my childhood, and a reminder for my father that little kids should really just be chained down.