Three beeps stops everything. We're standing in line at the usual taco place one evening and the three beeps come through the radio. Most radio chatter is fast, absorbing the minimum air necessary, but these tones are languid, stretching out across the county. Everyone around a radio stops and waits. Three tones precede the dispatch of a significant incident, usually a house fire.

"Box two, sixteen. Smoke showing..." We relax. We're not on box two. For a minute the driver and I talk about the feeling we get just after the third tone. Waiting to see if things will suddenly speed up for us.

Late that night I'm making my bunk up, arranging my sleeping bag on the bare mattress and groping around the empty top bunk for a spare pillow. The long slow unfolding: beeep beeeep beeeeeeeeep. And then that perfect wait. Then: "High rise box 26 --" and I don't wait for the rest. Down the pole and running for my gear. It's silly, but I just love the rescue squad right now. I love how scared I am right now.

[I was talking to two colleagues earlier that night and they were telling me they've fallen asleep while sliding down the pole. I was incredulous, but they insisted that they had been so tired that they managed to catch an additional two seconds rest while they came down the brass pole next to the engine room. They regained consciousness instants later with their asses on the floor.]

But I'm about as awake as I can get. I'm inside the squad and grappling with my gear, arms fumbling their way into the padded sleeves. As the squad pulls out we roll around a bit inside, trying to find the straps of the SCBA in the lampflash darkness. I'm thinking: a high rise fire. And, in that stunning way we momentarily understand that which we think we already know, I think: I could die.

[Which is almost silly, because, like most such calls, this one turns out to be nothing -- a thin film of smoke a ceiling level on one floor, the result of a burned-out electrical panel. Seven floors up with tools and equipment, a period of standing around, and then seven floors back down. Help the engine crew pack hose again; stow all our tools. Trundle back home so much more slowly than we came, and back into bed with still a couple hours of potential sleep ahead.]

It's almost embarrassing to admit, but for my birthday my family made me a cake in the shape of a fire helmet. This was no mere flat reproduction, but a fully three-dimensional sculpture that demanded multiple layers and took them several hours to engineer. They actually got my helmet and kept it near them in the kitchen for constant reference and measurement. I had no idea what they were doing in there, only that I had been barred from the kitchen for a ridiculously long period of time.

The moment it was presented to me was possibly the highlight of my cake-eating life.

True to form, the family had taken photographs of the various stages of cake construction, so there's now a permanent documentation of the process. I wish they'd have taken them from a constant position and orientation, because I would have made a cake-building flip book to commemorate their efforts.

One thing I realized is that even though a fire helmet doesn't look really large, a cake that is almost precisely the same size and shape as a fire helmet is a lot of cake.