headline memories...

The news crackles with stories of fire, pushes on memories that are still tender after all these decades: the Bel Air fire.

Here’s what I remember: A line of flame contoured the ridge top, which was perhaps a mile and a half away. I looked out the kitchen window again and again, sat on the front step watching the smoke billow up from the north and west. The sun was a red ball in the sky. My father met with the neighbors and established an overnight watch.

The next day, there were whispers among my junior high classmates. Parents arrived, anxious, milled in the hall, grabbed their kids and drove away without explanation.

School closed early and we were all sent home. On the carpool ride, the car was filled with a kind of muffled confusion. I got home at the same time as my father, who had left work early. My mother wasn’t there; she had taken her mother, my beloved (and only) grandmother, Elsie, to the hospital for gall bladder surgery.

The house was in disarray, things missing. We had been robbed. No, not robbed, we finally realized — what thief would take the hamster, the little bronzed ducks I had made from clay as a child? Dorothy, frantic about her mother, about the fire, had rifled the house for the irreplaceable — my father’s birth certificate, a favorite painting, little Sam in his wire cage — put everything in her car and driven off without leaving a note.

We were lucky. The fire never got much closer. But friends weren’t, their homes consumed while they were in school, at work, in Mexico. Coming home to singed ground, chimneys stark as gravestones, their lives changed instantly, profoundly.

Elsie never came out of the hospital. The confusion and impossibility of her death are forever entwined with the chaos and grief surrounding the fire, and, in the unsteady echo and ooze of memory, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, almost exactly two years later.

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