Michael D. Davis.

I guess you could say I believe in omens. I’m not going to see a bluebird fly overhead and then move to Belchertown, Massachusetts, but sometimes there are signs. And particularly what I love is when the universe reassures those moments of precognition, no matter how insane or stupid they might have been.

So, some months back, middle of the summer, I woke up with a jolt. I had a nightmare. My nightmare was that the house burnt to a crisp around me. Now, I could have shaken this off, gotten something to drink, and gone back to bed, but I didn’t. Instead, at whatever time it was, I went online and bought some smoke alarms. It seemed logical.

Now, let’s skip forward to another morning. I wake up to use the bathroom, It’s around seven am. This is around the time that my Father, The Old One, makes his toast. I smell something. I can’t put my finger on it. I go and locate The Old One to see if he knows the location of the smell. He says it’s the toaster, It had burnt the bread a little more than usual that morning. It apparently also didn’t help that it was the heel of the loaf that he toasted. I shrug and accept this explanation. I then go back to bed.

This all leads us to this morning. I am asleep when The Old One does something of which he has a habit of, he wakes me from my slumber. Half asleep, half dead, I see him standing before me, wanting to tell me a story.

It starts, like all of my Father’s days, at the break of dawn. This would be the time when a primal urge, that is set deep inside his bones, wakes him up with a furious craving for peanut butter on toast. Bleh, if you ask me. Nevertheless, The Old One gets up and throws two pieces of bread in the toaster before going on to his usual morning routine. Somewhere in this everyday train of events of his, The Old One starts to smell a burning. It is then that he notices a small amount of smoke coming from the toaster.

Taking out the blackened, scorched bread, my Father sets eyes on the issue. Down in one of the slots, still glowing, are the embers of one-half of a wooden clothespin. No one knows how it got there. However, the odd theory and bit of speculation have been bandied about. The Old One who uses the machine every morning without fail, somehow never seems to find himself at fault, of course, in any scenario.

Ma told The Old One to purchase a new toaster after hearing of the incident, which makes sense. What doesn’t make sense was The Old One’s response, “Why?” To The Old One, there was no problem with the toaster, after all, he had eaten the toast. It was scorched black, smokey, and kind of woody, but he choked it down.

So, this may have not been that big of an issue this time, but I feel vindicated. I can sleep safer knowing I purchased those smoke detectors. And it may be nuts to have purchased smoke alarms after having a nightmare, but come on, look at my family, my Father goes around toasting clothespins, I get it honest.

Oh, and we ended up getting a new toaster after everything, one without a chard piece of wood at the bottom.