Fire and Fear

      The first fire that I remember was the one that consumed the car dealership next to our house in Buffalo in about 1955. Neither building exists now, but then my bedroom was in the back on the side next to the car lot, a Plymouth dealer, I think.  

   Cars were always parked with their rear ends against the chain link fence that stood just a few feet from the side door of our house.   Across the lot was the show room with offices and repair shop.  

     I was asleep but something kept bothering me. Opening one eye to peek made the other eye pop open. The walls of my room were dancing with light. There was noise too - hammering, shouting, whooshing. There were flickering lights outside the window.

     My parents were up, sitting in the kitchen talking and drinking coffee. Standing on a chair at that window, I found the action. There were fire trucks, police cars and people all making plenty of noise.   

     Lights were flashing on the vehicles and flames were clawing into the sky from the roof of that building. 

     My memory, as a six-year-old, is probably of a larger building than really existed but, considering what would be in such a building, it would have been a ferocious fire.

     My mom, not one to coddle, told me to go back to bed. There was nothing there for me to do or see. Back in my flickering room, smelling smoke and listening to the activity, the night slowly crept on and my fear of fire began.  

     In the morning, I learned that firemen had been died in that fire. Fire equaled fear and their fear must have been unbearable. 

     It wasn't much later when my fear leapt higher than those flames on the roof. 

     I was in second grade. My school was the third level of a large, rectangular building. The basement had the kindergarten classroom, stage and gym. The Holy Spirit Church occupied the ground floor, and upstairs were classrooms for grades one through eight. 

     I suppose the alarm rang but my memory starts with opening the classroom door and crashing into smoke. There were stairs to race down. 

     Nuns were always flying up and down those stairs, their long habits trailing behind with billowing skirts grabbing children's ankles. Kids could and did trip on those habits and woe to the kid who knocked over a nun.

     During that escape with smoke coming up the stairwell and classes rushing down and the image of the other fire replaying in my head, dodging the nun's habit, holding the railing and keeping ahead of the big kids suddenly became too much. I fell. 

     Trying to hold onto the railing caused me to turn around so that I went bouncing butt-first into an unsuspecting collection of kids and nuns turning them into a tangle of arms, legs and lost Mary Janes on the landing.

     The kids who were not angry were mean. They told me that all the boys had seen my underpants while I was bouncing down the steps. That was bad in second grade. Add to that the smell of the smoke, the shame of the fall and the aches and pains of bouncing down the stairs and I was one upset, whimpering, lonely little kid.

     Happily, no people were hurt in that fire. The old organ in the basement had caught fire and filled the building with smoke. It was all under control and we were back inside in a short time, but it took two years for the nuns to forgive and forget.

     During that time, when the alarm rang, the nuns would corral all the dangerous kids like me.  

"You get that one!" someone would call, and a nun would rush over, hike her skirts up in one hand and grab me with the other, revealing to the astonished eyes of elementary kids, black stockings on nun-legs.

      I wasn't around any other fires until decades later when the Chevy Vega, a small station wagon that we owned at the time, had its engine rebuilt.

      I was the first to drive it home after the repair when suddenly flames were licking up around the edges of the hood, sending thick, black smoke into the windshield. I stopped, jumped out and ran.

     The fire burned itself out. It seems that, when the engine had blown, the insulation on the underside of the hood was soaked with oil. With engine heat, that oil became a cloud of thick, greasy smoke. The assurance that it wouldn't happen again meant little to me. I was not about to drive that car, so Rick and I traded.

      The next day, my ride was the Volkswagen. Unfortunately, while driving it down a short cut behind the Post Office in Chenango Bridge, smoke started pouring out of the heat ducts under the back seat and from the slats around the hood. I left it in the middle of the road and considered taking the bus for the rest of my life.

     The last time that a fire tried to get me involved a huge, outdoor gas-fired kiln on the Alfred State campus. Lorraine and I were firing it, and it still seems a miracle to me that I was ever willing to get near such a flaming monster. The temperature was climbing very slowly so we were looking in the peep hole often, hoping for signs of change.

      You might never have had such a kiln to deal with so let me say that it has some bricks that can be pulled out so that the potter can look inside to look at things called cones - formulated materials that will bend to indicate that the kiln has reached temperature. The inside of a kiln becomes a roaring fire - all orange and yellow, giving off heat and light as the pots go through the physical and chemical changes that make clay become pottery.

      About a second after replacing the peep hole brick, the kiln exploded and sent a flame about thirty feet into the sky from the chimney and had people from over a mile away asking, "What was that?"

     Had it exploded with the brick out, at least part of the huge flame would have found the peephole as the point of least resistance and my head would have been wrapped in an intense flame.  Stoneflower Pottery, and my future, would have never been.

     Emilie escaped a fire, too. She and two friends were driving back to school from Buffalo when the car in front of them skidded off the road and into a tree.  By the time they stopped, that car was in flames with the driver inside.

     Without regard to personal safety, they ran to the car and worked to open the door. Emilie reached inside, pushing back the fear and the nausea, and unhooked the seatbelt. 

     Together, she and Ethan dragged the driver to safety while Brianna pounded on the door of the house to get someone to call for help. Later, three sets of parents realized how brave their children were and how thankful they were that the car hadn't blown up.

     I don't know if Jay has been around any scary fires. He doesn't tell me about all the dangerous things that he does. I suspect that it's better that way.