Nothing on earth quite like the early morning drive to firefighting class through a still-darkened world and armageddonally empty streets. Nothing much on the radio; most folks out at this hour are coming home from work, and they aren't an advertiser-friendly audience in the minds of the station programmers. They get cheesy top-40 countdowns and other bland fare. So I'm accompanied by the muffled and ground-up sounds of familiar tapes, the ones that endure summerbake and winterfreeze in the glove compartment and just keep on giving.

I like waiting at lights with no cross-traffic and no one behind me. I have the heater running so loud that it's hard to hear the music. The smoky smell from my gear permeates the car and is utterly evocative of itself -- I realize I am living inside what will someday be a memory. It is a strange sensation, like taking possession of a graceful historic home and wondering if it's okay to pound a nail into the wall to hang a new picture. Like a stranger asking if they can take your photograph. And it can be paralyzing, infused with equal parts of the venoms of grief or happiness.

We spend most our hours in the sad, subconscious knowledge that we will eventually forget almost everything we do. In two years, will you remember getting out of your car at the gas station on a cold winter evening, breathing in the the smell of gasoline and blowing out little jets of frost, the metal pump handle cold in your hands, and peering into the bright little convenience store to see the attendant watching a little television screen, warm, oblivious and isolated and somehow emblematic of the boredom of perfect contentment in his little island of light?

The pressures of the next day compact the sediments of previous experiences. That little moment will hover outside your awareness for a while, but eventually it will be lost, never to come to mind again. It will be walled off in your crypts, and then it might as well never have happened. Rare is the day you know you will remember all your life, and that sensation is one of immortality.

The sky lightens and I drift on to the highway, nearing the fire academy and its painful demands. I dread the day before me. All I think about is getting through the next eight hours. But I am happy because I will remember this, and the me that is me will not be forgotten as long as my forever lasts.