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.