Recently, a fire occurred in one of the apartments in my complex, and it made me stop and wonder about the important questions. Seriously, what the heck happened between Brad and Jennifer? Are they going to patch things up? Will there be a very intimate, touching, public reconciliation? Oh, the suspense!

But when I was through gushing over them, I actually did take a real pause. It’s just that you don’t expect to see the bent and broken frame of an apartment window, a window of the exact dimensions as your own, and seeing the tell-tale mark of black smoke on the brick wall of a building not more than 50 feet away from your identical doorstep.

Everyone knows the results of fire. It’s usually on the news, and it’s usually Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. There’s usually a bunch of adorable displaced tow-headed children. There’s usually a kitty-cat who was either missing for a time or who perished tragically in the fire trying to alert the family of the impending danger.

But seeing it relayed by a talking head is not what an actual fire is like. Last year, I had the distinct displeasure of being woken up (at 9 in the morning on a Sunday! I mean, really! How inconvenient for me!) by the voice of my mother on the answering machine. “It’s your mom, we’ve had a fire, we’re at the hospital, but we’re all OK. Come home. Now.” Most likely caused by an electrical short, the fire was in the family room in the back of the house, which was then further ravaged by a group of over-eager firefighters. As she was being given first aid at the scene, my mother questioned the necessity of breaking all the windows in the general area with such a sense of gusto. But she was grateful to them as well. In true TV-land fashion, those excellent men located our own aged kitty-cat and administered oxygen to revive her. They also went far beyond the call of duty by cutting a hole in a five gallon bottle of water to transport my sister’s gargantuan gold-fish out of the house, an event by which we were all really impressed.

While it never seems so at the time, or the near future, the people over in that building were lucky, just as my family was incredibly lucky. No one was killed. All the assorted animals made it out OK. All we lost were possessions, most of which are replaceable. But I know that if I got close enough to that apartment to get a whiff of that same choking smoke, the terror I felt at getting that phone call and the fear I felt after seeing what the house actually looked like, it would all come back. You can buy new possessions, but it’s really hard to shake bad memories. What’s the overall message here? Pick up the phone. Call your family and tell them you love them. Do that first. Then watch E!’s most recent coverage of the Michael Jackson case.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.