Fire Door

I was walking back from Fort Greene Park after a morning trot when I happened on a mass of five-to-twelve-year-old children, holding hands in double file. They wore white and blue uniforms, and every score or so was headed up by a youngish woman. All the children, essentially, were black. They were having a fire drill.

I remember that in high school fire drills were a welcome reprieve from classroom boredom. We had one every quarter, which seems frequent now. I estimate that a new student joined our ranks at about the same rate, so maybe my school thought the best way to greet new kids was with an exciting simulation of catastrophe.

Either that, or we were testing each newbie's courage.

I now work in the financial district of New York City. I like to imagine a skyscraper's worth of young professionals, holding hands in double file, walking and joking their way out of the danger zone at the end of every fiscal quarter. Something tells me fire drills still happen to adults, but something else tells me they don't happen in quite the same way.