My wife and I are among the most neurotic people on the planet when it comes to fire. To wit: I have an almost obsessive-compulsive need to check every dial on the stove exactly four times before leaving the house, even if the oven hasn't been used in days. It's as if I fear the burners on the stove have a Stephen King-like mind of their own, and are bent on burning down the house.

My wife has a similar fear of candles. Better to light one candle than curse the darkness? Not her. She would much rather bump into the kitchen barstools in a blackout.

In both our cases, there are good reasons for our fear -- or, at least, reasons that are comprehensible.

When I was 4 years old, back in the Mesozoic period of the mid-1960s, my bed caught on fire. The culprit was a nightlight that was too close to the bedding.

Initially, I hadn't a clue the sheets were smoldering. There was no alarm in my bedroom. (The battery-powered smoke alarm, a ceiling fixture that many of us now take for granted, would not even have a patent until 1969.) I simply woke up parched and my eyes were watering, and so I wandered into my parents' bedroom. I told them my throat hurt and I wanted a drink of water. My father good-naturedly stumbled out of bed to fill a glass for me. But he smelled the smoke, and together we discovered that since I had left my room, the bed had ignited and it looked now like we could toast marshmallows in the little bonfire beside my bureau.

The story has a happily anticlimactic ending: Moments later, my parents and my older brother and I were standing outside in a road called Covent Place -- among my favorite names of all the streets on which I have lived -- while firefighters extinguished the blaze. There was smoke damage and my bedroom had seen better days, but it wasn't long before we were back in the house.

The following summer in a village six hours to the north of Covent Place, my wife -- then a little girl -- watched the curtains in her upstairs hallway abruptly go up in flames. The town had lost power and she and her sisters were using candles to navigate the dark corridors of the old house, and suddenly the drapes in a window on the second floor were ablaze. Fortunately, this tale also has a pretty dull conclusion: Her mother had an extinguisher in the kitchen, and she smothered the fire within seconds.

Today marks the start of National Fire Safety Week, and the theme this year is "Practice Your Escape Plan." It could also be, "If our house catches on fire, we'll just jump out the windows," since that is about how much thought most of us have put into our escape plans if we discover while watching "Rescue Me" on television that we do indeed need to be rescued. A poll conducted for the National Fire Protection Association indicates that only a third of American households that profess to have a plan have actually practiced their escape, and I find even that number a tad optimistic.

And yet fires happen all the time. Vermont firefighters respond to close to 2,000 structure fires every year. According to the Insurance Information Institute, the odds that your house will catch fire are roughly one in 225 -- greater, obviously, if you happen to have a fireplace or own a woodstove, or you live in an older house with aging, more eccentric wiring. While one in 225 aren't the odds you would want at a gaming table in Vegas, they are a lot higher than being killed in a plane crash. And certainly we spend a lot of time contemplating that possibility.

Consequently, take a moment this week and discuss with your family what you would do if the curtains went up like a tiki torch or you woke up and your bed smelled like the ashes from last night's campfire. And while you're at it, check the batteries in the smoke alarms. Perhaps the odds of a fire in your house are small ... but my wife and I can attest that they are not insignificant.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on October 7.)

Obsession is the fine line between chick flick and stalker.

To wit: When John Cusack wistfully holds a boom box over his head outside Ione Skye's bedroom window in the movie, "Say Anything," we see a real romantic -- not a serious pervert.

Same when we hear in our heads the lyrics from the Maroon 5 song, "She Will Be Loved:"

"I don't mind spending everyday

Out on your corner in the pouring rain."

Of course, the rest of the song is a tad creepy:

"I know where you hide

Alone in your car

Know all of the things that make you who you are."

But you get my point. We all appreciate a romantic obsession -- certainly I do.

And we've all had them. Some of us have even been lucky enough to be the object of someone else's fanaticism. (Again, we're not talking the terror of being the object of someone else's restraining order.) An obsession is invigorating, inspiring, and it really gets the heart pumping. It gives us a reason for living -- something new to put on our to-do lists, something interesting to add to the calendar. (Text. Call. Visit. Try not to stalk.)

The most pronounced obsession I've had was with, fortunately, the woman who would eventually marry me and with whom I am celebrating our 23rd wedding anniversary this weekend. I was 18 when we met, and embarking upon my second semester of college. To this day I can still see perfectly in my mind the way she would stand when we were chatting together, her lips slightly parted -- a mannerism that is natural among women who are both attractive and emit (often unconsciously, especially at the age of 18) an erotic charge. There is something wanton and lubricious about lips like that.

Just for the record, men who are obsessed love words like lubricious. It's that sibilant S sound.

Women who are obsessed, even (and here I am conjecturing) diaper-clad female astronauts, are significantly less comfortable with the sibilant S.

In any case, my wife and I met at a party in western Massachusetts, where we both went to school, and we would date for two weeks before she began to fear I was getting a little. . .obsessed. It wasn't the roses. It wasn't even the frequency of the roses. Nor was it the phoning, or the fact that I stood outside her dorm room window with a stereo and extension cord long before John Cusack would try out that maneuver. It was the urgency of all our encounters, and the way I was suddenly dropping the L-word (the one with four letters, not seven) into conversation so cavalierly.

And so one afternoon she went home to Manhattan for the express purpose of getting some distance from me over a long weekend. And I, in turn, did the only sensible thing that someone obsessed could do given her evident desire to get away from me: I hitchhiked to New York City and showed up unexpectedly at her family's apartment.

Her mother, a woman who has always appreciated the teachings of Judith Martin -- a.k.a., Miss Manners -- invited me in for coffee instead of calling the police. My wife and I have been together ever since.

This is the sort of story that is lovely for us to recall now on our anniversary. It's not merely that it has a happy ending. It's a reminder of the wondrous ways a healthy little obsession can sometimes make us feel alive -- and, yes, separate out the stalkers from the spouses.

Happy Anniversary, my dear.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on October 14.)

My friend Freda Tutt doesn’t think I’m a seriously bad, better-report-him-to-a-social-worker sort of parent. But she does think it’s a wee bit disturbing that I have allowed my daughter, now 13, to shop at Old Gold since she was in the third grade.

For those of you who are not part of the Facebook generation, Old Gold is a clothing store on Main Street in Burlington that specializes in vintage fashion and costumes that come in all sizes (XS to XL) and movie ratings (G to NC-17). It’s popular all year, especially with high school and college students, and wildly popular this month because Halloween is nearing. Of course, it’s also pleasantly packed with young adults as prom season approaches, and Mardi Gras, and Valentine’s Day, and Christmas. . .

You get the point: Most months there’s a reason for someone to be enticed inside, and not merely because the mannequins in the windows are always total sluts.

In any case, if you want (for instance) a retro Annette Funicello wig the color of a radiation warning light, Old Gold is the place to go. And since my daughter has never met a wig the color fruit Jell-O that doesn’t interest her, we have shopped there a lot over the years. Moreover, a micro-skirt on an eight-year-old looks a lot like a reform school kilt: The skirts used to come down to her knees.

It’s also worth noting that everyone who works there is spectacularly nice – though once when I was there with my father and my daughter, my dad was a little uncomfortable because the woman helping us had hair (not a wig) the colors of the rainbow and the fellow who was assisting her had the scariest belt my father had ever seen outside of a samurai movie. As I recall, my dad spent most of the time watching the mannequins. My point? If you are over the age of 30, Old Gold can be slightly unnerving.

And yet it shouldn’t be, and in some ways owner Ed Winant has worked very hard to keep the place a civilized oasis of leather pants and feather boas in the midst of the great retail desert. To wit: You can’t use your cell phone inside the store, which means you actually have to pay attention to the people around you as if you were shopping in the Mesozoic era of 1979. There isn’t just a couch on which to crash if you are completely nonplussed by the counters of biker jewelry, there’s a coffee table with magazines.

Judith Martin – a.k.a., Miss Manners – would approve.

Almost every Halloween since 1999 my daughter has found her Halloween costume at the store, ranging from a gun moll to a fairy princess to Cleopatra. And, just for the record, that was a G-rated Cleopatra with absolutely no exposed skin below the neck: We live in Lincoln, and so that means there’s a chance you’ll be trick-or-treating in a blizzard. The people who toil there have always looked out for my daughter and have great common sense – even if they have dyed their hair so many times it will be drier than Cheez Doodles before they reach middle-age.

Still, Freda is a great mom and I understand completely where she’s coming from. Sometimes I worry that my fondness for Old Gold is similar to my affection for things like youtube.com and hoodies and wearing flip-flops to school in an ice storm. (Oh, wait: I don’t go to school. Never mind. Also, I don’t own a hoodie.) My point? Old Gold skews young demographically, and thus makes me feel marginally less like a middle-aged moron.

But then I remind myself: Almost all stores skew young demographically. The world skews young demographically. If you want to feel old, shop for ten minutes on Church Street.

The reality is that Old Gold doesn’t just have old cloths. Underneath that trampy nurse costume, it actually has old values, too.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on October 21, 2008.)

The other day I sat on my front porch and watched the circle of life in action. It was a real "Wild Kingdom" moment, except instead of a lion devouring a zebra, the wildlife involved three of my five cats and a mole. Oh, wait, there was another difference: My cats weren't eating the mole. Or killing it. They weren't even playing with it.

Instead, they had surrounded it on the slate walkway and then, more or less, become zombies. One, the massive feline who used to live in our barn, might actually have fallen asleep. Another cleaned her face. And the third, after growing bored of the mole, roused herself to try to catch a nearby butterfly. She failed.

Finally the mole realized that he was surrounded by losers and could escape. And so he did. Walked right past our former barn cat and into one of the many piles of dirt that once was a yard. I'd presumed that if the cats didn't kill the creature, eventually it would die of a heart attack. Certainly if I were an animal four or five inches long surrounded by 40 pounds of cats, I'd have a coronary. But, alas, no.

The result is that these days my yard looks like an image from the Louis Sachar novel, "Holes," except the holes are smaller. The mounds of dirt, however, are mighty impressive. My yard feels like one big sponge underfoot; that mole clearly has friends.

That's right I have five cats ... and moles. I'm a vegetarian and so there's a part of me that approves of my cats' unwillingness to eat meat that is recognizable. Once, back in July, I found a dead mouse on the slate walkway. Out of intellectual curiosity I placed it in one of the cat bowls in lieu of canned cat food to see what they do. Their response? They looked at me as if I were insane and howled for their Friskies. It was as if I were asking them to eat cauliflower. (The thought did cross my mind to next put the mouse in the blender to see if my cats would eat it that way, but that idea seemed to be taking the experiment in the direction of Serial Killer. Also, I would never be able to use the blender again.)

The moles are not a new addition to the Bohjalian landscape. I've had them for years. Once I tried to eradicate them with a massive, battery-powered vibrating rolling pin. You stuck it in the ground, and -- in theory -- the vibrations convinced the moles that they were living in Los Angeles and an earthquake was brewing and it was time to get out of Dodge. But instead they just moved around my house. I stuck the device in the back yard, and they migrated to the front. I placed it in the front, and they moved to the back.

I considered getting two, but then I realized they might move to my friend Rudy's yard, and his yard makes a golf course fairway look like the Addams Family's front lawn. So that wouldn't be fair. Or, the moles might head in the other direction, and take up residence in the church yard. And that wouldn't be fair either -- or smart, if you get my drift.

Consequently, I pulled the giant vibrating thing out of the ground and decided to rely on my cats to rid my small world of moles. Hah.

The next step? Maybe swap my cats with the moles. Bring the moles inside and kick the cats outdoors. You know, reacquaint them with their inner lions? Sure, once inside the moles might dig through the hardwood floors and tear holes in the carpet. But I've never heard of a mole that spews hairballs, pees on the computer or plays turd hockey on the tile. Our cats have done all those things -- without, I should add, earning their keep by keeping the real wildlife in check.

Oh, I couldn't really kick the cats out. But I may sit them down in front of that "Wild Kingdom" classic, "Cheetahs: Fast and Furious."

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on October 28, 2007.)