What I Did On Thanksgiving
By: Bill Harrison
Tags: Thanksgiving, Memoir, Oven Fire, Kitchen Fire, Fire

WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP…

I abandoned the Zoom call we were enjoying with my kids and my sister, and ran back to the kitchen, where I’d just returned the roasting vegetables to the oven. Black smoke was billowing, wraith–like, from the rear of the stove. Holy shit.

Photo by Patrick Hendry (Unsplash)

WHOOP SCREE WHOOP SCREE WHOOP SCREE SCREE…

The remote fire alarm and a smoke detector were squealing. The ringing of the phone in my pocket was nearly obliterated by the cacophony.

“Hello.”

“This is SimpliSafe.”

Our security service.

“Do you need the fire department?”

“No, no. Everything’s alright.”

“Your name, please?”

“William Harrison.”

“Ok, Mr. Harrison, we’re going to go ahead and cancel the fire department.”

I didn’t know if anything was alright. I just didn’t want a repeat of the false alarm we’d had a few weeks earlier when something I was sautéing started to, um, blacken, and I couldn’t figure out how to snuff out the alarm. That day my phone was upstairs. The firefighters, bless their burly hearts, rolled up in a New York minute.

Yeah, it was more important for me to avoid the embarrassment of a false alarm than to find out what was really happening with the smoke pouring out of the oven. I figured the veggies must be getting a little overdone. Fire, shmire.

The howling alarms were jumbling my brain. I grabbed the remote base station (the device that connects us to the security people), yanked out the power cord, and ran the foot-high plastic tower out onto the porch. I hoped the fresh air would somehow make it shut the hell up but it kept shrieking defiantly.

My spouse Nina appeared with a flaming orange kitchen towel dangling between thumb and forefinger. She chucked it into the sink and doused it with cold water. It hissed menacingly.

“How did that get in the oven?” I must have yelled.

“I have no idea.”

WHOOP SCREE WHOOP SCREE SCREE WHOOP…

My phone started ringing. SimpliSafe. Again — because I hadn’t yet figured out how to stifle the damn base station. I had a carbon copy conversation with a different operator. I wanted to smash the goddamn thing on the blacktop one story below, but instead fished a tiny Phillips head screwdriver from the everything drawer, opened the remote up, and thumbnailed the battery out onto the counter.

One down, one to go.

I pulled a dining room chair underneath the smoke detector. Nope, just out of reach.

“I’ll get the step ladder,” Nina told me, springing upstairs.

I had that round plastic nightmare down and its battery extracted twenty seconds later.

SCREE SCREE SCREE

There was still a smoke detector yowling from somewhere. I hooked the step ladder in the crook of my arm and hoofed upstairs.

Silence. Finally.

I cranked open the bedroom windows and flipped on the ceiling fans. The smoke from that little towel had spread everywhere.

The kids and my sister were still chatting amiably on Nina’s laptop screen when I returned to the couch, out of breath, a medicinal scotch on the rocks in hand.

“Where’d you go Dad?” one of my daughters asked.

Nina had muted the sound on our end so the family was spared the ear–splitting drama.

“Oh, y’know. Just a towel on fire in the oven,” I reported.

“So what are you guys having for dinner?” someone said to Nina.

It was as if nothing had happened. I eased back onto the couch and sipped my drink.

The turnips were bitter but the carrots were nicely caramelized.