Fear of fire, or why I won't marry for money

I was leaning over the stove trying to scrape ground turkey that had accidentally fallen on the side of the pot rather than into it, when I was making a batch of chili.

Suddenly I smelled something burning.

I looked to the counter and saw that a paper towel that was too close to the flame had caught fire. I had a flash of "aaaauuuughhhh," and then, because there was no one else to deal with it, I picked up the non-burning end, tossed it into the sink, and turned the water on.

I had a very different reaction when my mother and I were cooking Thanksgiving dinner in November and we opened the oven door to discover that the oven wasn't just preheating to cook the turkey roulade - it was on fire.  Flames were shooting out from the bottom pan of the oven.

I am terrified of fire. I consider myself relatively fearless - I don't worry about being mugged or eaten by bugs or of walking by myself at night. But fire - and particularly kitchen fires - seriously freak me out.*  Maybe reading too many news articles in the Times of India about dowry killings when we were there - mothers-in-law who murdered their new daughters-in-law, but it was always made to look like a mysterious kitchen fire.

Although I suppose that if I need to be worried about being burned up in a dowry fire, I would have to be married to someone whose family only wanted me for my dowry. At this point in my life, I don't think my parents would pay someone to take me off their hands. And I'm certainly not forking over the cash. I don't have any particular desire to get married anyway. So there. Eat shit, imaginary future mother-in-law.

Anyway.

My mom and I looked at each other. We are both intelligent, sensible, highly educated people. But we were paralyzed.

What do we do??

My brother Josh was sitting calmly at the kitchen table reading the newspaper.

I said, "JOSH! What do we do when the oven's on fire???"

Josh is always a calm presence. He's level headed. He knows what to do. He doesn't freak out.

He came over to the oven. There was obviously some substance or object burning under the bottom pan, but we couldn't figure out what it was. A number of options were thrown out.

One of them involved trying to smother the fire with flour. That ended up just making a mess.

Finally Josh figured out how to remove the lower pan. What we found was a ton of dog food, some of it in flames. No one could understand how any of it got there.  We cleaned it out.

Buster must have been to blame. But Josh saved the day.

That's what he does.

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*I am also terrified of birds, but that's another story.