Much much much to my surprise, however, she contacted me on MySpace asking for another date. Hell yes!! It was like fate had handed me my winning hand. I was a proud man when I made her mine and even more ecstatic when she admitted she loved me. Things were finally falling into place it seemed. I had attempted to take some classes and boost my firefighting education, but that proved to be more difficult than it appeared since the storm had destroyed a lot of our learning materials in the county. I found myself being in Mississippi more often to be closer to the girl I was now in love with. It didn't help my bank account, but I was happy being closer to her. In the interest of bailing out my bank account from what was inevitably a pitfall, I decided to take on a night job delivering pizza. It was only a few hours a night and would make up the difference in fuel expenses driving back-and-forth to the warehouse. Since she was taking classes during the day and working part-time in the evening, it really helped me stay close to her while being able to afford the gas going back-and-forth. Shortly after I started, however, gas prices fail to an affordable rate. There was no need in keeping a part-time job to pay for gas when I could afford it again now. Not to mention, being one of the only hard workers in the building and having to stay till 11 o'clock at night to pick up everyone else's slack was getting old quick.
It wasn't very long into our serious relationship, and being in love, that we began to roll through our first rough patch in our relationship. At the time, she had a hobby that I was not at all a big fan of. It seems like quite an insignificant thing to have such strong feelings over now, but at the time I was very passionate in my disagreement. It wasn't something that would have driven us apart, but for a few days, there was a lot of "figuring things out" being done. Once we had come to an agreement and the makeup was done, we moved on with our loving companionship. I was a happy man with her at my side.
She was interested in me being a firefighter and found it quite admirable. She was an open water diver and was into that quite a bit. Our fire department just happened to have a dive rescue team so I suggested to her that she could do dive rescue with us and we would have something else to do together. She didn't think that was such a bad idea, so she quickly accepted. Her late stepfather was a firefighter in California and she had become interested in doing it herself as a tribute to his life. It wasn't so bad fighting fire alongside your girlfriend, it was actually something cool to do together. One of the rules of the fire department is if you want to keep something, don't bring it to the fire station. I would learn this lesson the hard way. After six months of being together, we decided that we wanted to try living together. We were eager to move forward to one day having our own family, although we were big on taking things one step at a time. We ultimately shared a two bedroom apartment with a mutual friend in a town between where we lived separately and where my warehouse was. It was a very nice, short drive to work every morning, but it was a little over an acceptable response time to the fire department area. I ultimately decided that it was worth being a little further away from the fire department to figure out how life would work between the two of us and to be closer to work.
You've heard me say that a line of duty death in the fire service is never a good thing to hear about. You've heard me say that a firefighters "last call" is an emotional thing for firemen to hear. One thing that you pray, during your whole career, to never here is the fire tone sending you to one of your firefighters homes. You hope it's never one of yours that you get called to. It was a typical night at the fire station. I was on the computer, playing on MySpace, one of the captains was in the paid guy's office watching TV. We shared a channel with the department to the south of us, so when the fire tone rang, we had to wait and see who's call it actually was. We had gotten a call at the station from one of the lieutenants, who was also an EMT with the ambulance company that serves us, that told us we should go check on the Fire Chief. He had heard the ambulance company get dispatched to the street the Fire Chief lived on for a heart attack. Not knowing exactly which address the he lived at, he called us to do a welfare check on the Chief. Then, all of a sudden, the tone rang out. The three of us cleared the inside of the building. Leaving the station, we were never sure that the doors had gone completely over the trucks when we tore out. We arrived there quicker than I believe we have arrived at any fire since I've been with the service, but were we too late? Everything humanly possible was done in an attempt to revive him, but our attempts were unsuccessful. That night, we lost a man that had taught a lot of us everything we knew. He was a good man, an honest man, a professional man, he was our Chief...and he was gone.
I had never been to a firefighter's funeral before, and each one is not any more of a pleasurable experience. We were led by procession of fire trucks from over a dozen departments Coast wide. He was a very well-known man in the fire service. He passed on education, experience, and knowledge to dozens of firefighters that are still fighting today. This last call was especially uneasy for us to hear. I couldn't have been more thankful to have my girlfriend at my side and this time. Being a member of the department, she had come to know the Chief almost as much as the rest of us, so this had hit her as well. She was a rock though. She wanted to be a nurse, she wanted to help people in their time of need, and that's what she was going to school for. She found out quickly though, that nursing school was neither easy nor cheap. Nursing school was also slightly difficult to enroll in because of the popularity. To keep from losing her status with her financial aid people, I suggested an EMT class to keep up her hours, thus keeping her financial aid streaming. It would also give her field experience for the ER or other locations of nursing. She didn't think this idea was a bad one, so she enthusiastically enrolled. She probably would've made a good EMT if she would have studied and practiced more. We were moving towards our one year anniversary around the time the EMT class was almost complete. It was here that we hit another rough spot. I started noticing more and more men come into her life. Some of them I knew, some of them I wasn't too familiar with.
This rough patch in our relationship would last quite a bit of time from this. My mind was stuck on the thought that if her and I were going to have a marriage, kids, and a life, there could be no interference from outside men looking to sabotage this good thing that we had going. Looking back, I probably went about it the wrong way, but I was 21 and in uncharted territory. Firefighting, at this time, was pretty much at a standstill for me. Not that there weren't things going on, but my head was just not in the game enough for me to be risking my life, or anyone else's. I had even made a move from the warehouse that I was currently working back to the delivery service near my hometown that I had worked with before. This was an attempt to gain employment closer to where her and I both wanted to move.
It was always my plan that one year after being involved with someone, and six months of living together, I would be entertaining the idea of getting engaged. When the one year mark hit, her and I were still battling our two sides of outside members of the opposite sex getting in the way of our relationship. It almost led to me leaving one night. Somehow, we would power through the bad times, put a smile on our faces and act like everything was okay. We even decided to spend our one year anniversary on the four wheeler, taking a ride with the couple that took that night ride with us and got together at the exact same time. One of which had been a firefighter with me for quite sometime. The problems didn't go away, but we were able to dig deep and find some good in each day.
We thought that maybe we needed a little vacation, a small getaway just the two of us. We decided to take a weekend trip to her home state of California for a family get together. It would be a good opportunity for me to finally meet her family and to get out of Mississippi for a couple of days. Even though it would not be a vacation for just the two of us, it was only the second vacation of our lives period. We needed it, too. My supervisors at my job that I had been with for a few months and strived to make myself an asset to were not pleased that I was going out of town on a Friday. When they threatened me with my job, I politely told them that maybe someone else was a better fit. Little did they know, I had already spoken with a woman about a security job that paid more than they did, offered a little bit more freedom, and offered much less animosity from anyone with an office. They had once again began to blame myself, and other drivers for the things that I believe they were doing behind closed doors in their offices. I was not about to put up with false accusations for the rest of my time there. I started the security job the day we got back from California.
Just before this all had transpired, I had started evaluating the department that I was originally from. They were hurting for firefighters, even though some of them refused to admit it. Since that used to primarily be my home, I felt compelled to help. I decided to transfer back to my original department in order to boost participation. In the firefighting aspect, this proved to be a good choice, but in my personal life, it may have been a straining factor in my relationship. The new Fire Chief had seen my progress in the fire service and wanted to make me an officer, but because of the department policy, he couldn't. That didn't deter him from granting me with the responsibility that I asked for regarding department inventory. I finally felt like I had a purpose on the administrative side of the department, and I began to feel a little better about myself.
It was no secret that my girlfriend and I loved each other, and we both wanted the same thing, but the gap in between her mindset and mine was more difficult to close than, I believe, either one of us realized. Some of the city and county firemen were among some of the men I was noticing entering her life. I honestly felt betrayed. The harder I tried to keep these things from happening, the faster that ship sailed. As if the problems weren't bad enough, our lease was coming to an end on the apartment. Not a big deal, right? We were looking to have a place with just the two of us, and our roommate was looking to move in with a couple of her friends to cut down on rent. Everything to this point was agreed on. I had gone out and secured a place for the two of us closer to where we had originally moved from. I had made a verbal agreement with a friend of ours who was already renting the property that he would transfer his lease to us when he moved out. He was renting this property from family, so it was understood that it would not be an issue to transfer the lease. The day that we had everything packed and ready to move, I had called the uncle for some reason that I can't remember now, that is when he informed me that he had no knowledge of transferring the lease and had already promised the property to someone else on a six person waiting list. We were stuck. Not having a clue of what to do, and no family on her side that would allow us to stay, I called on my mother to allow us to stay for a couple of days while we figured out what our next move was. Finding a place to rent already isn't the easiest task, try doing it when you need a place to live almost immediately.
Again, living in Alabama makes it hard to respond to calls in Mississippi. It also made working in the town that I was originally from even more difficult to work in because of the driving distance. Once again, I spoke with the owner and warehouse manager of the warehouse that I had become so fond of working at about three acquiring my job. Still, I never said that I didn't do dumb shit. I also reacquainted myself with the department just over the Mississippi state line that I had responded with previously. I was a welcomed asset to them. At this point in our lives, there was no denying that we were on the path to being husband-and-wife and starting a family. We figured that maybe it was time for us to start looking at our own house to purchase. My mother agreed to let us stay with her in a spare room until we either found a place to rent or a house to buy. I seem to think that filing taxes is sometimes easier than two young people trying to buy their first home together. We were wading in water with blinders on. Places for rent in our part of town were hard to come by with the budget that we were trying to work off of. The more we tried to move back where we wanted, the harder it seemed for that to happen. We did start developing a deeper affection for Alabama in the winter. We really started developing an affection for Alabama period. We thought that may be somewhere near the Alabama state line was just the place that we were looking for. So we began to look. Realizing that I would not be able to respond to any fires in Mississippi, living in Alabama, I decided to join the local fire department in the community where we were living in Alabama. Even here, I was a welcomed asset. Things were a lot different in Alabama than it was in Mississippi, where I was used to, but I did the best I could.
We would find properties that looked promising in Alabama, either for rent or for sale, but once we dug deeper into the details, we started finding things that gave us a bad taste in our mouths. We even started looking further north from where my warehouse was located, in an area all to itself with all the amenities that you would need in a small community without having to venture into town. It almost felt like home. Try as I might, each place I would find in this community for us to live would have just enough of something to turn her nose up at and stray away from. Little did I know, she had made up her mind that she wanted us to live in the area that we originally came from, and she was not entertaining any ideas other than that. Christmas came and went and was a very bright and successful one, in my opinion. That year was filled with lots of love, family, and new beginnings. The New Year's was also one of the most memorable ones of my life. We decided to spend it with her two younger siblings and a couple who were dear friends of ours.
Our relationship seemed like it was turning around in our favor. It appeared that we couldn't be any happier. I decided, finally, that I was going to ask her to marry me. Now, how would I do it? I came up with a plan to throw her a birthday party for her 21st birthday. We would have as many family members present as we could since this was a major milestone in her life. I figured that it would be a good opportunity to share in the moment with as many loved ones as possible. Everything was slowly going as planned, until she got suspicious when I went to go pick up the ring. I thought I had lost my element of surprise, but was able to lie my way around and make her believe that I was helping my father do something. I gave him the ring to keep safe for me, because I knew if she had the opportunity and the drive, she would find it around the house where I would've hidden it. The night of her birthday, almost everyone that I had invited was present. I had tried to coax as many people to attend as possible without giving away my plan for the night. I quickly acquired the ring from my father as soon as he arrived to the house. I stooped beside her as she opened each gift that waited for her. When it was all said and done, I looked around the room to make sure that no one had any last minute surprises that we didn't know about. When it was determined that the gifts were, in fact, all finished...I made my move. I put one knee on the ground, reached into my pocket, and pulled out the ring she had been dreaming of for months. This was the first time I had ever asked a woman to marry me in my life, and I was scared shitless. As a fireman, there is always a certain degree of fear. Sometimes, you have to put that fear aside in order to do what is necessary. Don't mistake courage for the absence of fear, a fireman can feel fear. Just because we run into burning buildings to put water on them, or to save a life, doesn't mean that we aren't a little scared the entire time we're doing this. If we're lucky, we lived to tell the story, if we're not so lucky.... People live to tell stories about us. The job isn't just a job, it's a calling. We do what is necessary of us thinking that it is our duty, but what we are really doing is leaving behind a legacy for those following in our footsteps, or for those loved ones that we leave behind to remember us by. Either way, we always stand side-by-side to protect those in need.
We are the thin red line.
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