The fire truck did not ask for permission to be the loudest thing on the block. The fire truck took permission. The fire truck was the only vehicle in the city that could break every law on its way to stop something from breaking. The fire truck ran red lights and drove on the wrong side of the street and parked wherever it wanted and nobody said a word because the fire truck was on its way to save something and saving something is a permission slip that never expires.

The fire truck came around the corner and the sound came before it. The horn. The siren. The engine. The brakes. Four sounds in sequence and each sound was louder than the sound before it and the fourth sound — the brakes — was the sound of a thing that weighs forty thousand pounds trying to stop and the stopping was the loudest part because the stopping was where the urgency met the physics and the physics said you cannot stop forty thousand pounds in fifty feet and the fire truck said watch me.

The firemen jumped off the truck before the truck stopped. The firemen were already running while the truck was still moving and the running was the part that made you understand that this was not a drill. A drill is calm. A drill has a clipboard. A fire has men jumping off a moving vehicle in boots that weigh five pounds each running toward a building that is doing the one thing a building should never do.

I played guitar on the corner and the fire truck came and I stopped playing because you do not play guitar when a building is on fire. You do not play guitar when men are running into a building that other people are running out of. You stand on the corner and you hold your guitar and you watch and the watching is the only appropriate response to a building on fire. The guitar is silent. The fire truck is loud. The building is screaming. The firemen are working. The street is watching. And the music waits. The music always waits for the fire to end because music is not more important than a building on fire. Nothing is more important than a building on fire. Not even a song.