About eleven o’clock the following morning, there came a knock at my door along with the unexpected sight of a uniformed fireman. “We are suggesting that everyone in your area evacuate at this time,” he said. So I put my four large dogs into my Honda Accord, surrounded by piles of cherished items I had hastily gathered, and drove north on Pacific Coast Highway to nowhere in particular, my fear but a footnote to the ecstasy the dogs were experiencing over the opportunity to ride in the car.
“No, no,” I remember saying as they leapt and bounced with glee, “it’s not a walk. It’s an evacuation.”
“Always so negative! Leave it to you to see the downside of everything,” they yelled back in cheery unison. “Stop nitpicking! We’re going for a ride!”
Only later did I learn that I had been the only resident of my block who had followed instructions and vacated, probably because I was the only woman who lived by herself. Every male head of every household elected to stay behind and pursue the long-cherished dream of protecting the homestead by standing on the roof with a garden hose. No clearer illustration can be found of the way that men have a very different relationship to fire than women, to say nothing of a very different relationship to hoses.
Now here I was again, in a rerun of a situation I had come to dread. But this time, because there was a man in residence at my house, when the firemen again appeared, I did not leave.
Unbeknownst to me, I had now joined the ranks of the “planning to stand on the roof with a hose” faction of my neighborhood. Our plan, if you could possibly call it that, was to postpone an evacuation while we kept the fire at bay by dampening our wood-intensive structures. But because that meant there was a chance that we would have to evacuate if the hosing plan proved futile, we still had to perform that most unnerving of all fire-in-the-neighborhood rituals: deciding which cherished possessions were coming with us if we did have to leave.
The dogs, the deed to the house, the insurance policies, the checkbooks, the computers, and the hard drives: these were no-brainers. Paranoia had caused me to have most of my important paperwork still in a container I had never unpacked from a fire threat the previous year.
“I’ll be out in the studio,” Andy said, as he headed out to the converted garage to sort through the densest stockpile of his own personal belongings, some of which were enormous electronic keyboards.
I stood alone in my office, looking at all my stuff, confronting once again the eccentric collection of souvenirs from a million particular moments during my twenty-five years of living here. Obviously, furniture was a moot point. But in every room of the house a showdown was brewing among hundreds of inanimate objects, all crying out, “You’re not seriously thinking of leaving me behind, are you?” Which of these things could I fit into the remaining car space after my four large dogs had already boarded? Only a handful of the millions of God-knows-whats were going to make the trip.
One of my flaws (which I prefer to think of as one of my endearing traits) is my inability to stop saving worthless things that I find funny. Take, for example (though I doubt you will actually want to), an old Xeroxed sign I tore off a telephone pole because it said, “Turn your canker sores into cash.” So hilarious was it to me at the time that I now have it preserved in a frame. And it does not want for like-minded company. Every level as well as every vertical surface of my home is littered with something I’ve saved: ceramic figurines that caught my eye because of their peculiar subject matter, weird foreign food packaging I felt I had to buy because of amusing misspellings. Thus two little overall-clad Amish children holding eggs that are larger than their heads coexist happily alongside my many prized Remnants of Failed Advertising Campaigns. I may have the last two packages of Kraft macaroni and cheese featuring “Andy from Minnesota,” a sallow pie-faced teenage boy sporting a Moe Howard haircut who is posed with a big forkful of mac and cheese, his eager mouth agape as he calls out to other teens to “Become a Blue Box Kid!” A week after I bought the packages, they were pulled from the shelves, giving me the responsibility of preserving this piece of poorly conceived macaroni history. Or my mint-condition box of Urkel-Os cereal, which I was prescient enough to buy when it first appeared for sale. Or my spray bottle of Chuck Norris’s “KICK brand shoe and boot deodorizer,” originally purchased from a coupon in the back of a magazine simply because I was stunned to learn that Chuck Norris was now a player in the world of foot deodorant. Then there were those packages of off-brand freeze-dried squid from a Korean market that are called “Happy Family.” Or my cans of “spotted dick,” a still-for-sale pudding from England.
But I’m not insane. I knew I couldn’t fill up valuable space in my car with spotted dick. So I heaved a remorseful sigh and made a beeline for the twenty-three bulging photo albums in my closet. Damn! If only I had scanned those dinosaurs onto CDs. Okay, … which of these photos did I need to see again? The ones from art school and childhood? Yes, of course. Those photos were the only evidence that these things had actually happened. But the trip to Bermuda with an old boyfriend to whom I no longer spoke? Or those pretty shots of the Venice canals and Florence, of which I was once so proud? I could probably find shots just like them, only better, somewhere online now. From golden precious memory to fire fuel in one easy step.
As I moved from room to room, I recalled performing this same unpleasant task during the evacuation of 1993. Back then I’d decided that I would sacrifice all the albums full of the nineties, since presumably there was more ahead. This time the present seemed more pleasant than the past. A new relationship meant a new unfolding narrative. That made sense right now, but would it after everything had been reduced to cinders? What about saving letters from old boyfriends to use as comedy material? Was any of this crap worth money now just because it was old?
No, no, no, I had to argue, grabbing myself by some imaginary lapels that were not on the T-shirt I was wearing. Do NOT pursue that line of thinking. The only place that road can lead is to your own segment on Hoarders.
I quickly changed my focus to the three big plastic tubs full of my diaries in the guest room closet: occasional writings that I’d been updating since I was about eight. Did I really want to relive details like “My hair was really oily today”? Or “Lyn’s party was horrible. I borrowed a muumuu from Kathy because I thought everyone would be wearing them but only three people did”? Or “Oh God, please please let Jeff call me and I will promise to become a devout Buddhist”?
Absolutely not, I thought, turning my back on them but not really finding it possible to walk away without first packing the little pink-and-red vinyl diaries with the fake locks from elementary school because … well … come on! Aww! My little eight-year-old self, sunburned and overweight, hair pulled back in a too tight ponytail the way my mother insisted, writing embarrassing things I never in a million years could have imagined my much older self would one day not only find funny but reexperience, with almost as much intense embarrassment as I’d felt when I originally wrote them.
I rifled through the messy closet in the guest bedroom, in which I had stashed junior high school drawings of horses, membership cards for stupid fan clubs, and scrapbooks full of photos of cute boys I loved who were on the TV shows I watched. There were also annotated programs from the Beatles concerts I attended and an old pink plastic box that I bought with my allowance when I was ten, embossed with a drawing of a teenage girl wearing a ponytail and talking on the phone alongside the words “My Treasures!” I knew it was stupid and cheesy-looking even back in grade school. But what kind of cold, unfeeling monster would let a “My Treasures!” box melt into a pink puddle?
Next I hit the bathroom. Moisturizer? Definitely. I’d need that. And one lipstick. No, two … er … five. Definitely mascara. And under-eye concealer. Got to have my bite guard, my hot rollers, and just this one other lipstick. And this tube of cortisone cream. And this bottle of Wellbutrin. And my toothbrush, and that’s all. Oh my God! Clothes! Better go pack some clothes! But what clothes,
exactly? Where was I going? To some motel with a small, kidney-shaped pool that looked out onto a freeway in a nearby city that I had intentionally avoided visiting for years. There I would sit on a musty-smelling bed scrutinizing aerial footage of televised fire devastation for signs of what was happening to my neighborhood. Not really a dress-for-success or formal-evening-wear kind of occasion. Unless all the cheap rooms were booked and I wound up in some overpriced but more glamorous hotel, where the other guests would shun me if I didn’t have something nice to wear in the dining room. That meant I had to bring along good clothes? How long was I going to have to stay?
During the course of this rambling internal debate, in which I simultaneously undervalued and overvalued everything in my possession, I realized I’d been pulling clothes off hangers in a frenzy of dissociated energy and throwing them into a suitcase. It was like I was driving drunk. Somehow the suitcase was full but I had no memory of filling it.
Next I made several trips to the car, each with my arms full of scrapbooks, diaries, and paperwork, cramming them in wherever I could, trying to make them fit. My car was now an overstuffed duffel bag, albeit one with an internal combustion engine.
That accomplished, I joined a small group of my neighbors who were standing around in the middle of the street in front of my house: a place where under ordinary circumstances no one would ever be standing. There we gathered like villagers, waiting nervously for some armed invading horde. Every few minutes all conversation would be interrupted by a loud clatter as a helicopter flew overhead on its way toward the ocean to fill up its tanks with water to dump on the fire.
The TV was reporting that there were still sixty-mile-an-hour winds, yet the air on our street was completely still. This gave us all the impression that we were not in immediate danger, even though we could see a glowing line of embers on distant hilltops. That meant the fire was probably three or four miles away. The TV said it was headed in our direction.
At about noon, the people next door decided that there was no reason not to cook a big breakfast. When they invited us to join them, we were delighted. And so it came to pass that we ate biscuits and gravy in front of a big flat-screen television, staring at vivid real-time footage of the “fire event,” which, they now reported, was only two miles away.
While we ate, we debated how we would know when it was the right moment to get in our cars and leave. Predictably, the women were ready to flee. And the men? They were in favor of standing on the roof with their hoses.
“I’m gonna stay,” said my neighbor Jack, a big bear of a man. As he spoke, his wife and daughter were packing the car.
“Then I’m staying, too,” said Andy.
“But, guys, logically speaking,” I said, “if the fire hits our street, how much good are you two going to do standing on the roof with a hose?”
“Come on, Merrill, we’re guys, we don’t have much left,” said Jack. “Don’t take everything away from us. Let us have this much.”
For the rest of the meal, we channel surfed every local newscast for clues that would help us break the stalemate. With nothing definite to go on, it wasn’t long until we wound up back outside, next to our packed cars, staring at the glowing hillside. It was hard to tell if the fire looked worse or better.
That was when someone noticed a uniformed fire official walking into the house across the street. Why was he going in there? Was that a good sign or a bad one? “He’s a friend of ours,” said the teenage son of the family who lived there. “He will definitely tell us when we have to get out.”
This caused us all to begin staring at our neighbors’ front door like a bunch of dogs waiting for someone to throw us a ball. About a half hour later, when the same teenage boy emerged from his house and offered a buoyant thumbs-up, we were all both relieved and encouraged.
“We’re safe for now,” we all said to one another, inexplicably hinging our life-and-death decisions on the hand gestures of a nineteen-year-old occasional lifeguard who I mainly knew as the kid who filled up my recycling bin with empty beer bottles he was hiding from his parents after a big party.
Two extremely long and hazy days later, the fire was extinguished. Ash no longer rained. The sky was once again blue. The streets around my house had been spared. We had been lucky. Not far away, sixty houses had burned to the ground.
Even after the threat had passed, my personal state of emergency continued. I was agitated for another month. Only then did I relax enough to finally unpack my car/suitcase/chest of drawers.
And as I did, I began to examine for the first time the assortment of things I had selected to take with me on my frenetic escape to my brand-new life.
I had plenty of cosmetics—kind of ridiculous, really, since I hear they sell these items in stores. But the contents of my suitcase of clothes was something to behold: five button-down shirts and three pairs of sweatpants, period. I had forgotten to pack any coats, sweaters, underwear, bras, socks, nightgowns, dresses, skirts, or shoes. I’d never looked in my jewelry drawer. I’d taken no paintings off the walls, not even the ones I’d worked on for months; no books, CDs, movies, or high school yearbooks, nothing from my house that, in an ordinary frame of mind, I would have argued passionately against ever throwing away.
If all this stuff on every surface and wall of my home didn’t mean enough to try to save in an emergency, why was it cluttering up my life? What were all those clothes in my closet doing there if I didn’t like them well enough to bother rescuing them from a fire? And what does it mean that I saved only diaries and photo albums, physical evidence meant to trigger old memories that exist only in my head?
Looking back, the ignored clothes are easy to explain. I was pissed off at them and probably punishing them, for the way they continually disappoint me. When I buy them, it is usually because I think that they will turn me into some new, improved version of myself. Then I catch a glimpse in a mirror, and for some reason, I still don’t look much like that six-foot-tall thirteen-year-old model from the Urban Outfitters catalogue, even though we both have bangs. The truth is, I would have loved to throw them all into a big roaring fire, but my practical nature would never allow it. The threat of a dangerous, uncontrollable natural disaster doing the deed for me was a chance to start all over again.
Same with my knickknacks: things that make me laugh are part of what makes life worth living for me. I love my Pez containers, ceramic dogs from thrift stores, and snow globes from airports. But daily life tempts me with an endless array of equally amusing items. Until I move into the dedicated museum space I so richly deserve, I have just so much shelf space to offer my collections. If I lost every single one of these things, I have no doubt at all that my shelves would again be full in a couple of weeks.
On the other hand, there’s no starting over with ancient memories. Even though I don’t like that many of mine, I feel a certain commitment to preserving all those experiences I carry around in my head, good or bad. The ongoing conversation I can have with the person I was at ten or twelve feels like an odd piece of time travel.
Since I had bothered to save that pink “My Treasures!” box I bought as a kid, I sat down to open it for the first time in decades. Maybe the poor chubby goofball that spent her allowance paying for this thing had left some kind of a message for me inside. I was curious to see what she had to say to her future self, a creature she had never imagined would really exist. I don’t remember her having any long-range plans, except for buying a horse. On that count, I had let her down. Would she be mad at me four decades later?
I opened the lid of the box. The clasp was rusty. It had come with a key that I had stopped keeping track of that first week, after I’d learned that the lock could be easily picked with a paper clip.
At the very top was a neatly folded fancy, fluted, twenty-four-inch white ribbon I’d won in a seventh-grade horse show. I’d been proud of it then, though now I wondered if they’d given one to everyone who entered. Underneath the ribbon was a coffee-stained
program for a sixth-grade dance recital entitled “A Chance to Dance.” At first, I wasn’t sure which dance recital this had been. I’d taken a couple of different dance classes when I was a kid. I opened up the cover, and between page 2 and 3, I found a discolored piece of notebook paper. On it were handwritten instructions along with stick-figure illustrations that showed exactly how to perform the dance I had done that night. Apparently, it had been written for some very unlikely moment in the future when I had forgotten how to re-create this timeless magic.
It began, “Stretch, stretch stretch; Down, up, stand, stretch, stretch stretch, down, up, clap, clap clap.” And it ended, “Back to place, jazz arms position, and jazz walk to the back line.” All these years later, the moves I described were the one part of the dance I could visualize. I could see the big school auditorium where the dance had taken place on a real stage. There were probably fifteen of us, all in tights without feet, divided into two rows. I was in the back. Was it because I was tall? Or was it because I was clumsy?
Slowly I began to remember how to do the jazz walk, with its accompanying head bobbing and finger snapping. I remembered that when we learned it, a couple of my friends instantly did it more gracefully than I could. I practiced and practiced, in my room in front of the mirror, to no avail; my friends still looked better doing it than I did. By age fourteen I would become so self-conscious that I would call a moratorium on all dancing, forevermore.
Meanwhile, back in the future present: had I been the victim of a devastating fire that had dismantled everything I’d built in my life, there I would have been, sitting on the floor of my new unfurnished rented apartment, trying to comprehend my loss. Well moisturized, and dressed in sweatpants and a button-down shirt, I would have opened up my “My Treasures!” box, examined my horseback-riding ribbon, and then realized there was nothing left to do but stretch, stretch, stretch, down, up, and clap.
Cool, Calm & Contentious Page 15
