I was spying on looking in on my friend Jeremy Halinen over on Facebook this morning. It’s the lazy person’s way of maintaining a friendship with someone. Rather than calling them up, or even emailing them, you look at their recent status messages to get a sense of what’s going on in their lives. Jeremy’s status messages never fail to entertain. Today, he’s asking people to “bing” themselves — meaning to look their own names up on Microsoft’s new search engine, bing.com, and he wisely includes the warning, “Don’t go on a bing binge.”

“Why not?” I thought. (I had to think this because I was not having an actual conversation with Jeremy, simply spying on paying careful attention to his status messages.)

My vanity search on Bing led me to a post about another Dana Guthrie, one I am very familiar with. He lives in my hometown, and I used to receive phone calls for him on my private line when I was a kid. I would pick up my little pink rotary-dial princess phone and some gruff-sounding person on the other line — obviously a grown-up and not one of my prepubescent playmates — would ask for Dana. “I’m Dana,” I would say. “Dana Guthrie,” they would ask, quizzically. “I’m Dana Guthrie,” I would chirp with a voice that hadn’t yet caught up with my age.

It always scared me to talk to these grown-ups when all I wanted to do was deconstruct the latest MTV video or squeal about how cute some boy was with my friends. Grown-up voices are intimidating, even at their most syrupy. I could hear the years of drinking and smoking — of pain, love and loss — in those voices. Voices that weren’t unlike my father’s and mother’s. And it only got worse with advancing age, which I learned from spending time with my parents’ older friends; the voice eventually breaking down to a fistful of aggregate in the throat, and the throat in turn reduced to nothing more than a faulty tumbler that never manages to polish the rocks it encases.

I wasn’t scared enough to hang up the phone, though, or to not answer these strangers’ inquiries. This was before the days of telling children never to answer the phone; of getting on the internet and searching for sexual predators in the area, pinpointing their houses and avoiding those houses on walks in the neighborhood; of parents figuratively and literally tethering children to themselves.

Back then, a tornado warning was just a tornado warning — an occasion for dragging out the mattresses to catch glass turned to shards and two by fours turned to stakes. I actually looked forward to the warnings and crossed my fingers every time it began to thunder. A tornado warning meant we’d get some solid family time in, as my mother rounded up the candles and my father tuned the battery-operated radio to the AM news station.

There’s nothing that says, “We’re a family, and we’re in this together” like collectively hoisting a full-sized mattress off the spare bed frame, dragging it down the long hall and using it to block the hall closet doorway. Nothing like my mother and I breathing stale air inside that closet, blankets and candles at the ready. Nothing like my father standing in the middle of the living room looking out the front windows for whirling dervishes in the sky, radio in one hand, cigarette in the other — our lookout, our protector.

Our family always functioned at its best, each of our roles most clearly defined, when a natural disaster was imminent. In these moments, as the sirens growled through the air, we felt we could take on, and survive, anything. If not, we’d go down as one. And in the wreckage, we would appear as we should: caught in the moment of familial togetherness, like the bodies we studied in history class at school, the ones captured in lava at Pompeii. A child curled into the chest of its mother. A father leaning over the two, as if saying a final blessing.

Now those same weather sirens suffocate towns and cities with different meanings. Amber alerts warn us that another child has gone missing, that a family has already been devastated. We find ourselves looking up and out, over the sky, into the entire urban landscape, everything in our line of sight a potential crime scene, every adult a potential criminal, every child potentially criminalized.

If I were a child now, and someone called for the other Dana Guthrie, I doubt I would talk to them. But this was the early ’80s, so I told those people I’d never met who I was. At some point, a dialogue must have opened up because I learned that the Dana Guthrie they were looking for was an adult male, and a police officer. Because children love to step out of their own skin and imagine themselves as others, especially those elusive, complicated and intriguing people known as adults, I of course had no problem stepping into the role of being the other Dana Guthrie. Wise. Strong. Important. Brave. A working man who could take any perpetrator down — not that I knew the word perpetrator yet.

Knowing that there was another Dana Guthrie out there, and that he lived in my own town, made me feel the importance of plurality. (Was this how royalty felt when using the royal we? We are Dana Guthrie. We live in Norman, Oklahoma. We have telephones. We have callers.) Knowing the other Dana Guthrie was different from me in so many ways made him even more intriguing. He was the male to my female. The age to my youth. The productivity to my aimless meanderings and mishaps. The gun to the wad of gum in my hair. The dark blue uniform to my Ocean Pacific. The cop car to my ten speed. The bullet-proof vest to my training bra.

I even talked to him on the phone once. (Although that could be one of those childhood flights of fancy that gets recast over the years as fact. For instance, I was convinced until I was about 20 years old that a small decorative box my parents displayed in our living room was an item my father excavated while tilling the garden one year, a surprise gift from the earth. Even after my mother told me that wasn’t the case, it took a few more years for my mind to distance itself from that misconception. But let’s just move forward with the narrative here, assuming that I actually did talk to Dana Guthrie.)

He must have been getting phone calls for me as well, as baffled by the squeak-toy voices on the other end of the line as I was by the gravel-road voices on the other end of mine. As a police officer, I could see how he would want to get to the bottom of that. So he looked me up. How important I felt! To be called by the other Dana Guthrie, the adult one! The respectable one! To be talking to him directly as opposed to through his friends!

At some point, I stopped having a separate line. There was an issue with a couple of girls giving me a hard time, prank calling me and threatening to beat me with chains behind Stubbeman Village. Sometimes when they called, they didn’t say anything at all. They just jangled chains then hung up. Where was my police officer when I needed him? Why couldn’t these girls make a mistake and call the other Dana Guthrie — he’d surely set them straight. When I asked my father to have my phone line disconnected, the occasional calls that kept me tethered to the other Dana Guthrie stopped, and he receded as my mind became occupied with other role-playing games.

But when I bing-ed myself today, there he was, recipient of the Crime Stoppers Award. I did a little more sleuthing and saw that his work includes investigations into cases involving the disappearances of children. That makes the other Dana Guthrie a hero. I am honored to have grown up in the same town as him, and to know that he is helping others look out and out in their communities, and to see less aftermath, more clear skies.