The Building's on Fire: A Time to Meet Neighbors

The apartment complex has a small deli round the back, which is from where I was returning with a quart of milk when I heard the building alarm sounding.  This usually means some kid pulled it, but that hasn't happened since the family was evicted, due to the you-don't-understand-my-child's nastiness, which included keying cars.  The fire alarm is a giant, clanging bell, one installed on every floor.  With twelve of them going off at once, you can hear it at the far end of the complex.

I will then be going up the nine flights of stairs, as the elevators are programmed to go to the first floor and stop working until the engineer, who has to be called in to turn the alarm off if it's after hours, arrives and resets things.  I was not looking forward to the stairs, even though it is less of a nuisance than it is a visit to funky town.  Need the end of a marijuana cigarette?  Yesterday's lunch wrappers?  Trot the stairwell, it will be there.

Okay, okay, I start the journey.  Except by the time I got to the second floor, there was a smell of burnt hair, people running down past me, and smoke.  Fire?  I asked; yeah yeah yeah, fire, they loudly asserted, buzzing by.  Time to reevaluate the situation in a safer area; I turned back down the stairs and found a cluster of neighbors that mostly I have never seen.  It was a long five minutes before the firemen pulled up; they found the apartment on the third floor, and the emergency turned out to be burned dinner.  No flames, but an immense amount of smoke which reached up to my floor and beyond.  Makes you wonder what they put in those microwave dinners; sugar, compounded by the plastic tray could do the trick.  Just ask my Mom, after one of my chemistry set explorations.

The firemen left, the smoke hung greasily thick, and the bell clanged on.  I headed back up the stairwell
to home, to see how the cats were doing.  With them it ranges from indifference to disappearing god knows where; that alarm sounded for one hour and twenty minutes last year, when the man with the key couldn't be found.  I was as jangled as feline nerves myself.  But what could I have done to save my guys if it were a real fire? The artwork?  Family photos?

This building is constructed of concrete slabs and loaded with asbestos in the linoleum; add a metal door, and the place is generally considered fireproof except for the things people have stuffed into their spaces.  My paints and papers would certainly add to the inferno besides the wooden furniture and six bookcases.  I usually don't think of these things, but I do have two fire extinguishers; one at the front, and one at the back.  In the fifteen years I have lived here, there has only been one genuine fire on a Christmas Day; someone was wrapping presents too close to a lit candle, the paper caught, she knocked over her vodka on ice and there went the Christmas tree.  It was contained to her own, but smoke heavily damaged the upper apartments.  To get to any floor, the firemen have to haul themselves up while wearing 70 pounds of equipment plus any crowbars or axes.  They were not happy, but the alarm system couldn't discern between  blackened chicken parmesan or a genuine blaze.

Fire travels faster than you think, it isn't something to be messed with; an idiot started a four alarm forest fire with matches one dry summer, when there wasn't enough water in the wells or the pumper trucks to put it all out.  That one jumped the crick and headed for our house, I remember Mom wrapping herself in a heavy coat and scarf to spray with a hose.  Fortunately it was a house of brick, though the roof could have caught.  The ground steamed, hissed, and sent up wisps of smoke for days; reporters came, firemen returned to check on things, the police couldn't prove it was my cousin.  After a week, we were allowed to walk the fields burnt down to black; the trees, the brush where the pheasants lived, and the wild strawberries were gone.  What was left were charred skeletons of meadow animals too small to make it beyond the fire's path; rabbits, voles, weasels.    It took ages before the first green shoots returned.

Tonight we are safe, my cats are clingy close; I've checked the extinguishers and the smoke alarm.  No real danger, just a reminder of what could be and to stay reasonably vigilant.  You can't worry about it, or it takes over your life and can be magnified into exceptional drama.  As I was going up the stairwell, I heard a man's panicked voice yelling Hello?  Hello? until I answered.  What the heck is going on, why did the firemen leave?  I explained that it concerned a burnt dinner and that things were safe.  He was still shaken, "But what about that?" he pointed with his finger.  It was a cigarette butt, crushed on the stairs.  "It's kids," he huffed, keeping himself worked up.  "Yup," I replied, and started up again; he thanked me for stopping to talk.

It's nine o'clock and time for bed this evening.  Doors are locked, windows cracked open for fresh air, and there's water in the cats' dish.  Everything is in place, which is reassuring in itself.  Still a chill in the air as there will be for a couple of months, but I am sure you have noticed swelling buds on tree branches, and the birds returning, beginning to call.  Today you did many good things, tomorrow you will have the opportunity to do others; count yourself in, you are a lovely human.  Rest and visit ideas before you drift off, imagine if.  Sleep will pull you under to a place of dreams, to where rabbits, children, and you are safe.  We need that, a space between waking lives.

Equus Felidae in Alabaster

White animals have missing parts, mostly in the brain, and I have proof.  This horse, you see, was actually pretty dang smart to have calculated the "this plus that equals" results, but no visible aberrations were noticed, as I was terribly naive to animal plotting.   Friends and I had gone horseback riding at a stable that rented out horses for fifteen dollars an hour, and no, I don't know the first thing about it.  Never got the hang, but the animals were fascinating and large.  I had no qualms climbing on, hitching my leg in the stirrup and hauling myself up into the saddle.

My favorite was Number 16, an irascible but sane gelding who was built like a determined tank; sturdy.   He wasn't available that summer day, so I boarded a white mare who looked like the skinny blond girl in your Kindergarten class whose pasty pink button nose was always stuffed.  This white horse didn't whuffle hello, it stared at me with a malevolent, chilly blue eye, just like any suspicious child who wants to know just what's in that bottle labeled paragoric.  No problem; it will respond to encouraging pats and the stub of carrot in my jacket pocket.  Yes it will.

We rode the path to the meadow and I was quite happy with plodding about, wander here, dither there; the horse didn't seem to mind with no indication that the evil watchspring driving the gears was near to midnight in its equine brain.  The meadow was large, immensely rectangular and my friends and I went to the furthest end, then turned the inside corner.  We had been having our teen girl horse party for maybe fifteen minutes.  Ding ding ding.  Midnight.

My horse lifted its head, ears pricked, and did a fantastic imitation of a plane taking off and leaving the runway with a surprised me hanging onto the saddle horn.  This animal hauled ass while I was scrabbling for a better grip on the reins to stop this train, and demonically headed for a low branch of the oak tree hanging over the trail; the branch caught me, scooping me off the back end of TWA Flight 260 into the muck where I imagine many a human had been dumped; the horse headed back for the barn down the meadow path, and I picked myself up out of the dirt, mad as hell that I hadn't seen it coming.  Disney animals that helped sew your gown or clean the cottage got the boot from my new reality, as the kids employed by the stable ride brought the escapee back to me.

"You should get back on, or the horse will think it won."  Really.  Well, I did, still shaken after the breath had been knocked out of me, and the kids mused that maybe they ought to saw that branch off wasn't that supposed to be taken care of last week?  So, how many humans had been hornswoggled by horses?  It's only this horse that does that, and only when it's close to feeding time; we thought you knew how to ride.  Well, could a warning label be slapped on this critter?  I patted the neck and the rest of the day was pleasant with no sudden ideas from either of us.  It wasn't the first or last time I lost my seating on a horse; so far, so good.

Now, my white cat is named Princess Snowbelle as when I picked her up from the City Shelter, the slip of paper said her name was Ashley.  Good god.  Who the hell names a cat Ashley?  Her head hung over the edge of the plastic dish pan she was laying in, a large spot rubbed raw on her neck from the pressure.  So cat, pick another position.  Nope, like this one.  But cat....

No one wanted her as she was born a bit crooked and hops like a rabbit; her kneecaps are luxated and her spine is short of the usual number of vertebrae.  She responded well to the volunteer men, but remained depressed and just hung her little head until St. Susan, Cat Beacon saw her in the cage above the cat that I had come in to adopt, my Kai (who was originally named Cassandra).   I asked if I could see her, and the older fellow brought her out.  One hop and I was lost.  However, she's crazy.

Snowbelle, or Tish, or Get Offa That will be sitting on my lap in a limp state of purr when some sudden signal from her home planet explodes the rockets and she blasts off, using her claws for traction, drawing blood.  For years, she bullied my littlest cat even though I explained and explained that look, one good swat and Snowbelle will leave you alone because she can't run for beans.  Tulip now holds her own and has put Snow in her spot; they haaaaate each other, but this white crazy brought it on herself.

She sleeps next to my head on the pillow I bought for her at Target just a few days before they were hacked and therefore my card was on the blink for about a month because of this cat.  When leaving to visit the voices in her head she runs like the calvary, again, not off the free and clear side of the bed, but directly over me.  I often wake in the morning with a new souvenir of her speed etched into my skin.  It's okay, she just isn't wired soundly.  Be aware and notice the similarities: both animals were/are white, both have spontaneous, cataclysmic epiphanies.  Just keep an eye out for yourself.

The night is clear, apparently the near pass by the asteroid went fine, and the snow has stopped for a moment.  There are a few things to do before I pass into sleep, and let go the paths of the day.  Shake out the blankets, turn under and into the furrow of layers, plant yourself as a seed, an idea, a dream; wake to the day, rise with the coming spring story.