Thankfulness, after the fire

photo from Cambridge Chronicle

Of course I'm thankful for the usual things, which are no less important for being usual: the love of my honey, the excellence of our cat, the support and love of my family, privileges and gifts, education, job, paycheck, safety, health. Among other things.

Still, much of my life this fall has been shadowed by the effects of our apartment building's fire. I never noticed how many fires there are in a city, until we were displaced by the fire in our apartment. So, now I don't pass by articles about fires, but instead read them with a little knot of sadness and dread, vividly imagining what they describe: recently a large fire destroyed everything for many residents of a nearby neighborhood--a much worse outcome than we had, given that we only lost our home but not most of our belongings. (Water damage made us homeless, not the flames themselves.)

Earlier today, while I was still at work, a fellow resident was looking for her stethoscope and smelled one that looked like hers. "What are you doing?" another resident asked her. She said, "Mine looks just like this but it smells like barbeque because it was one of the only things that survived the fire." When we had our fire, she told me about hers; she had lost almost everything. I hope she finds her stethoscope soon.

Someone else I know had her house burned down by a lightning strike; she's still waiting for it to be rebuilt. Of course, each of our experiences was different; still, like any little club of survivors, we feel alone in what we've experienced, and relieved to find others who have some understanding of what we feel.

Today I'm thankful for what was not lost in the fire: our lives, our health, most of our things. Thankful that it was not worse. But this is a refugee's thankfulness, an it-could-have-been-worse relief tinged with the sometimes angry, sometimes bitter, sometimes just sad knowledge that it certainly could have been a lot better.

This week, we received an organic turkey we'd ordered a long time ago from the farmer's market. Getting the turkey was an adventure, including waiting all evening two nights in a row for the turkey farmer to bring the turkey to us, With some kind of non-functioning email confirmation system and orders written on the back of envelopes, he'd unsurprisingly run out by the time I got to the farmer's market to pick up the one we'd ordered, then was driving around the city with a broken GPS system and a borrowed cell phone, with his wife at the farm reassuring me he would surely be coming very soon. One more thing to be thankful for: I'm not a turkey farmer. Anyway, after we'd ordered the turkey but long before it was delivered, we'd decided that with our schedules and the limits of the apartment we're subletting now, it wouldn't work to cook Thanksgiving dinner. So we have a turkey but not a Thanksgiving turkey. (We're going out for dinner.)

That's OK. We're soon to sign a lease for a new apartment, starting in the first week of the new year if all goes well. I think once we have a real home again, we will feel more thankful. We'll be thankful for things that we are gaining, and not for things that we didn't lose. We're going to keep the turkey in the freezer; like other more important things, getting this turkey was harder than it probably should have been. We'll eat the turkey in our new home, when we're feeling thankful in a new way: in this way, among others, part of Thanksgiving will come late this year.

where there was smoke, there was fire

It's too long a story to tell here for now, and with too many complicated feelings to tell easily. But, we had a fire in our apartment building, and we were temporarily homeless (though in an upper-middle-class stay-at-your-friends' houses kind of way), and now temporarily housed. I feared for my life only in retrospect, and all of the Hemodynamics family got out safely.

We're actually back in our old building but in another part of it, subletting the apartment of someone who didn't want to come back while the building was being rebuilt. In our old apartment most of the walls and ceilings are now demolished: our apartment itself didn't burn, but the water of the hoses came down through the walls to our apartment from where the fire was being fought above.

The halls are full of the white plaster dust, and the floors in the halls are stripped down to the wood underneath them. Everything is dusty and each time I turn the corner I smell the smell of smoke, which just reminds me of that night. Coming back to our building means smelling smoke, both literally and figuratively. It means being reminded of a traumatic event. But it also means reclaiming that event not simply as a disruptive moment, but as something that is part of our history, and shapes our future. It smooths out the trauma, into the clay of the larger lives we build. I think it's a good thing.

In the hospital, I realized recently that I was in a "don't f- with me" mood. Without my clippers and feeling grumpy about buying new razors and other such things that the movers were supposed to return to us, but didn't, I let my beard grow into a unruly patchy mess. Facial-hair-wise it was if I was some kind of Che Guevara wannabe slouching through a Harvard hospital, just biding my time until I could really make some trouble. I was using swear words more than usual. I was making dark jokes more than usual.

Today, maybe it's a sign of starting to recover that I went to the barbershop, and got my beard trimmed, and my hair cut, and even got shaved above and below my beard line with a straight razor, an unprecedented event. Slowly, I think my unconscious mind is joining my conscious mind in rejoining the normal world.

Still, out in the hallway it smells like smoke. It's going to take a long time for that smell to go away.