Fire

It comes without permission, random and fierce, eating everything in its path. It’s a destroyer as potent as war and more senseless than gangs of vicious marauders. It will take your home, kill your pets, undo your plans and make you vulnerable to a frightening unknown. It’s the fire that burns everything you love.

In Southern California a horrendous fire has destroyed whole portions of communities I knew as a child. Here in Prescott, where I write my articles, I can imagine what is now gone, and I hold in memory what I remember as a pleasant neighborhood, a grove of orange trees, and the open lots and streets where I played. In that Southern California town I taught in the high school, attended a church, and helped in my father’s shop. The only fires I knew of back then burned in a European war, where I felt far from that holocaust.

News of the Second World War, with its murderous treatment of Jews, the destruction of European towns, the suffering of populations who were bombed and starved, came to us only in short edited radio broadcasts in the evening. For us children the war was a story with bad guys. So we played ‘war’ in our vacant lots and used sticks as toy guns to shoot fictional Germans and Japanese. We subscribed to no newspaper, and the foreign battles were unreal to me until gold stars appeared on windows in our neighborhood, and I learned that people grieved the loss of their sons.

Scarcity was serious during the war — shoes, tires, butter — and rationing limited our supplies and activities, but our area wasn’t bleak. The doctor came to our house when my sister fell down the basement stairs. A milkman arrived at the back door with glass bottles topped with cream. We walked unmonitored to school. We played dodgeball in the street, and rarely had to stop for a car. Our one radio, in the living room, featured Saturday-morning programs for kids. I now realize how very long ago that was: before television!  before the internet! before Walmart!

Looking back now, it should be evident that I think of those days as blissful. I was proud of my little school and reliable parents. My mother was a neighborhood activist. She went to the Mexican area of town and started programs for the kids, including scouting. She began a parent/teacher group in our school and created a book club for moms. She taught my sister and me about classical art and music, encouraged by our father, who played mandolin and saxophone. None of the mothers I knew worked outside the home, but my mother would have been first in line for a job if it had been allowed.

That picture of Southern California in the past is an embellished memory, of course. I must confess here that I’ve left out some hard truths. I realize now that my little world was a sort of ghetto, exclusive and separate from our Mexican population. Everyone looked the same where I lived: white, tidy, and secure. The mothers stayed home and cared for everything. I assumed they liked that role, one of obedience without choices. I thought all America looked like our community. I never heard another language spoken, even Spanish. I no longer call that ghetto ideal.

Los Angeles was a thriving city where my father worked. No one imagined that police harassed Black people there or that the poor areas were neglected. No one imagined that fire and civil disorder would erupt. Yet here we are. People have rioted in benighted places in the city, and now fire flattens the suburbs. Some of Los Angeles looks war-torn. I remember the city as wondrous, eminent and wealthy. I remember apartment buildings and a Sears store. We didn’t venture there except on special occasions, and we took the trip in a red streetcar! I remember that my mother liked to window-shop — look in the store windows on the busy streets. I don’t remember ever going inside and buying anything.

Now, a mindless fire has leveled much of that California world I still dream about — its innocence, and ignorance, the clear air and reliable orderly ways. It’s now a place of destruction, where folks mourn for their lost, burned world. Fire has turned order into chaos, revised everything. The tokens of the past have gone. I wonder if the victims will ever turn to nostalgic memories like I do. My heart breaks for them as they wander their empty, scorched properties and search for any part of their lives that might have survived — a cap, a soft toy, or even a saxophone.