Everything, Everywhere, All at Once . . .

Yesterday afternoon, the dog and I were turning the corner from the park, and I saw my son Ian in the driveway, standing in the bed of his pool technician company pickup truck, wearing his pool technician collared shirt, sweeping—and when I got closer, he explained that some pool chemicals had spilled in the bed of his truck and he was cleaning up the mess . . . he was sweeping the granules of calcium hypochlorite—the stuff you use to "shock" a pool—and putting it all back into a big plastic drum; I didn't like the smell of it, so I told him to put on his ventilator mask, and he did so, and I grabbed him a trowel and a flat shovel to make the cleanup easier—and I should mention it was drizzling while he was cleaning up the spill and it had been drizzling while he was driving back from the Pennsylvania/New Jersey border, where he was working earlier in the day-- covering for someone who maintained pools in that region . . . once he got the bulk of the granules into the plastic container, he twisted the lid onto it, and we did a bit more hosing things down and cleaning up and then when he went to pick up the drum, he noticed it was HOT—there was some kind of reaction going on inside; I'm an English teacher, not a chemistry teacher, so I ran inside and googled some things and learned that because the calcium hypochlorite had gotten a bit wet and also because it was mixed with other organic matter from the back of Ian's work truck—some leaves and cardboard—that this was a highly unstable chemical situation, liable to spontaneously combust or explode . . . so I told Ian to call the fire department because there was no way I was allowing him to take the top off this plastic drum, which was getting hotter and hotter; a fire truck arrived in a matter of minutes, and the firemen got out and we explained the situation; just after the fire truck pulled up, my son Alex drove part way down our street and then had to back up, and he got out of Ian's car (which he had borrowed) and told me some very good news-- he got an engineering job in Brooklyn! with a company that takes city buildings and makes them ultra-energy efficient and green . . . awesome, amazing, incredible news!-- but there was very little time to celebrate, because the fire department had called the Middlesex County HAZMAT unit and they were on the way—and some police cars were pulling up . . . so I hugged and congratulated Alex and then got back to the task at hand—what was going to happen with this very hot drum of toxic chemicals in front of our house?-- I thought the HAZMAT crew would just take it away, but no such luck . . . they wanted Ian to call his boss and see if the company had a way to deal with and dispose of the drum—and then my wife arrived home from work, and I had to convey the GREAT NEWS! ALEX GOT A JOB! and the other, not-so-great news: YOU ARE STANDING IN A TOXIC EVENT! and then there was much consternation and many phone calls—Ian's boss had to talk to the HAZMAT crew— and there was much use of equipment—chlorine meters and heat meters and fire hoses (to wash away the pool chemicals in the street) and there were probably a dozen various town firemen and county HAZMAT guys chatting and discussing, and then another youngish guy from Ian's pool company showed up—but slightly older and much more experienced than Ian—and the HAZMAT guys put on their HAZMAT suits and tried to open the lid of the drum, but some yellow gas emerged, so they stopped—because they didn't want to release the gas into the neighborhood, so instead, the more experienced pool guy, who was a stand-up dude with an 80s mustache, a self-prossed "safety freak" who never removed his ear buds during the entire ordeal and had a wonderful, slightly jaded outlook on the scene (and he also gave Ian a nice plastic scooper) and this self-professed CPO (Certified Pool Operator) took the drum and put it in the back of HIS company pickup truck, and his job was to transport it to some county building in North Brunswick, where the HAZMAT people would meet him and figure out how to dispose of this mess—but before he took off with the drum, he shook hands with every guy there and thanked them, and then Ian and I shook hands with people and thanked them—this was quite the social event: town fire department, county HAZMAT guys, a schoolteacher and a couple of pool technicians, and the EMT guys that checked out Ian's vitals—all trying to figure out how to deal with this toxic, unstable drum of pool chemicals . . . but it seems we avoided a major explosion or a Don DeLillo-style airborne toxic event, and in the end, Alex got a job, and Ian might still have a job . . . we shall see (and I was going to abstain from alcohol this week, after a bibulous summer, but that resolution fell by the wayside—for stress-relief and celebratory reasons).