Should smoke detectors have radioactive material in them? The one above my bed does and that makes me a little nervous. I had to rub all three of my eyes to make sure I was reading it correctly.

It was 7:30AM on a Sunday morning and I was standing on my bed, in my underwear, holding my smoke alarm in one hand, wires still attached to the ceiling, and hitting it with the palm of my other hand. Anyone who didn't already think I was a loon needed only to look in my window at that moment.

The power had gone out sometime during the night. I woke up to the sound of my smoke alarm. It wasn't going off, but emitting some awful dying moan. I looked at my watch and gave my own moan. It was far too early for this shit.

I poked my head into the hallway and couldn't hear any sounds coming from the other apartments. I stood up on my bed and unlatched the smoke alarm from the ceiling. A cloud of dust fell onto my sheets with an audible thud. The wires seemed to go directly into the unit. There was no visible plug or battery. I tried the smooth out the ancient parchment that had once been its operating instructions stuck to the back. It was wrinkled and stained now, like a pirate map. In big bold letters it said, "Models that do not contain a battery will not function during a power outage." This unit had no battery but it was still sort of functioning. Well, not so much functioning as giving up the will to live.

That's when I noticed the second paragraph that said, "This unit contains radioactive material. Handle with care." This set off several alarms in my head. It never even crossed my mind that harmless radioactive material may just be part of every smoke detector. I tried to reason that they wouldn’t be stupid enough to equip a home with a glowing isotope strapped to the ceiling. But, for the record, this is an old building; it was built during a time when government trucks rolled down the streets spraying children with DDT.

The radioactive material was Americium. This, in my opinion, is one of the few elements, including Californium and Einsteinium, which must get teased endlessly by all the other elements on the periodic table. It kind of put my mind at ease. It seemed unlikely that I could be harmed by an element that wasn’t even recognized by the French.

Anyway, the power outages continued on and off into the night. As a testament to my lack of emergency preparedness I had only one flashlight and several Yankee Candles from my mother. That meant that if I wanted any kind of illumination I had to endure the smell of apples rolling in on an ocean breeze and falling into a great big sack of potpourri while being beaten by pine branches. After about an hour of this I became light headed and started hallucinating that I was in Candy Land.