Member-only story
Just Say Yes … and Yes … and Yes …
A rainbow has two ends, and it’s hard to tell where each one lands — from a distance you think you know, but the closer you drive, the further away the rainbow seems to move, until you turn a corner as the sun shines even more brightly, and the band of colors suddenly fades away.
So when I peer into the lost years — the ones before Dave entered my life — it’s hard to pin down particular beginnings. But one was an accident of numbers: Sitting in Barnet’s Town Meeting, one March morning in the mid 1990s, I looked at the shocking amount of money needed to build a replacement fire station, and found myself itching to question it. And somehow fix it.
That led me, a few weeks later, to visiting the existing “firehouse.” An aging, low-ceilinged garage, it held a firetruck that barely fit within, a re-fitted Willys Jeep ready for lugging gear to brush fires, and a lot of heaped and stacked gear. I could scarcely slip along the edge of the truck. Any firefighter decked out in coat, hat, and boots would have to wait outside for the rig to emerge from the garage, before climbing up and in.
How much more obvious could the need be? But like me, most of the town, other than the volunteer firefighters, had no idea.
Thanking the man who’d taken time to show me, I promptly offered to try for some grant money toward a…
