If Your House Were on Fire and You Could Save Only One Thing
What would it be?
The smoke detector outside our bedroom woke me from a sound sleep at 1:30 in the morning.
“What is it why?” I garbled as I fought through the twist of blankets to save myself. But my brain knew the answer. There was no smoke or fire in our apartment, but the smoke detector battery was dying. Which, of course, they only do at 1:30 in the morning.
Coincidentally, earlier that day, I had a conversation with one of the maintenance men for our complex. He is a young man, an army vet, whom my dog adores. As the man squatted and scritched my dog, we made small talk, and he revealed that he was frustrated because the apartment manager wrote him up that morning.
“The boss said I don’t have to respond to every call when I’m on overnight duty,” the maintenance man told me. “So a lady called me last night because her smoke detector was going off, and I told her to just disconnect it and I would fix it in the morning. I didn’t think they would want to pay me for two hours of overtime to run out here and change a battery.”
He shrugged, tousling the dog’s ears. “But I gots written up, didn’t I boy,” he said, baby-talking to the dog, who sympathetically licked his nose.
And then our detector went off that very night. Rob groused out of bed, shushing the dog, who whined and yapped at the piercing alarm.
I’ll never get to sleep
“Just disconnect it,” I told my husband, who stood precariously on the bottom rungs of a kitchen stool, stretching to the screaming round box on the ceiling. “They won’t come out tonight to change a battery.”
He struggled to yank the box loose from the wires, inexplicably darkening the clock and overhead light in the adjacent bedroom. But the shrill beeping stopped, the dog stopped whining, and we stumbled back to bed.
Of course I lay awake for hours after that, staring through the bedroom doorway at the hole in the ceiling where the smoke alarm should be. What if, after all, there was a fire somewhere in the walls or in the apartment below? What if we had just disconnected the only device that would allow us to escape unharmed from our third floor walkup?
Cue flashback music
Thankfully, I have only been in one fire, and even that wasn’t much to speak of. I was a freshman in college when someone dropped a still smoldering cigarette into the big trash can in the lounge at the end of the hall in the dorm where I lived. This was back in the days when it was still legal to smoke indoors.
It was a Saturday afternoon, and most of the women on my floor were in their rooms. My roommate, however, had gone home for the weekend, so I took the opportunity to clean the room and crank some tunes. I mean really crank.
The trash can erupted into flames, and the hall quickly filled with smoke.
Since I have no sense of smell (that story here) and my music was playing really loud, I had no idea there was a fire. I didn’t know that the fire alarm was blaring and that all my dormmates were filing past my room and down the back stairway. Happily dancing around my room, organizing books and papers on my desk, I noticed that my little trash can was overflowing, so I decided to carry it to the lounge and dump it into the big trash can.
When I opened my door, I saw a scene from the big fire on Emergency! You know — the one they saved for the end of every episode. And I half expected Johnny Gage to come racing down the hall.
“Get out!” the RA shouted at me. With a desperate look backward into my dorm room, the record player still blaring, I closed my door behind me and let myself get swept into the escaping mob, holding my breath to avoid inhaling the sharp, gray smoke. I wondered if the little trash can I still clutched in my arms, filled with used tissues and unusable ideas, might be the only possession I had left in the world. What would happen to my little book collection? My typewriter? My Bee Gees records?
Fortunately, the whole event was more smoke than fire. And the college took a major step to prevent future tragedies, not by banning smoking, but by removing all the trash cans from the dormitory lounges.
Just things, after all
Some forty years later, I lay in the dark wondering if I should pack a bag of the most important things and place it by the door so I could grab it on the way out in case the apartment really was on fire. But what were the most important things? My computer? All my books? The fingerpainting my granddaughter just sent me? And what about the dog? And the cat? Oh, and Rob? I began to play that game, “If your house were on fire and you could only save one thing…” The car keys? My debit card?
I dozed off finally and slept fitfully until morning. The building had survived the night, and the maintenance guy came right away when we called him to replace the detector and change the batteries. I walked around the apartment that day touching all my things. Just things, after all, in the grand scheme of things.
“You know,” my husband said gently, “we have renter’s insurance. If there were a fire, the only thing we have to worry about is getting out safely.”
I nodded. He was right.
“And the dog,” he added with a barely perceptible creak in his voice.
Yes, of course we would save the dog.
“And the cat.” His eyes were wide now as they flitted around the room.
“And our college yearbooks…and my Velvet Underground cds…and my autographed copy of Larry Csonka’s book…and….”
