the fire next door, part two: "what can you not live without?"

(continued from part one)

suddenly there was a man in the alleyway. a stranger, in the courtyard. was it the building super? no. the owner of the building on fire? “they’re coming!” he yelled up to the woman and her friend. "they're coming! don’t jump, they’re coming!”

i could hear huge, giant screams of “help me!” from somewhere else inside that building. shrieking. or was that my imagination?

the woman screamed back “i have to jump! i can’t get out! i have no fire escape! i’m going to die!”

don't cry, i told myself. strong. calm. rob now, yelling at her “no! i see them! they’re here! i see them! don’t jump!! please don’t jump!”

a ladder. a fireman. within seconds the woman and then the man were crawling out the window onto the ladder and down to safety.

the flames from ten feet away were shooting up and threatening our ash tree. i knew if that tree caught fire we were in trouble: it would surely cause the flames to jump buildings. the fire was even stronger now, harsher. reaching further up. the bottom of the tree…had it caught? was it burning…?

yes.

again, glassy eyed for a split second. someone could still be in that building, i thought. someone could be on the fourth or fifth floor, and not know what was happening. sleeping. or maybe a pet.

a dog.

suddenly i could hear it. i could hear reggie howling. reggie, our dear old airedale, dead over a year ago, howling, crying, terrified and trapped.

“think,” i said to rob, looking him dead in the eye. “what in this apartment can you not live without?” there was some panic. moments ago this was small, an annoyance, nothing threatening to us. now the heat coming in our back window was unbearable.

it was shut, and we were out the door.

in the rush to get out i had managed to grab my computer and stuff it in my backpack.

i thought of a photo of my mother that was on my computer. that’s why i took it. not for the internet, or for my writing, or for my music, or for anything else. for a picture of my mother that i knew i had on my hard drive.

continued...

the fire next door, part one: "is something burning?"

saturday, september 5th.

1:03 p.m.

“is something burning?” rob’s cousin laurin asked.

laurin, visiting new york from south carolina, was sitting on the living room couch in the front of our floor-through apartment, waiting for an important phone call. i was hunched over a computer in the office, working. “something is burning” i said, and rushed to the kitchen, heading immediately to the stove. i checked the burners, i moved the teapot aside, was there a potholder lying on top of…?


smoke.


thick, and black. i could see it through our kitchen window. pouring from the bottom floor of the building directly behind ours.

in the summer our bedroom window is often left wide open. there’s a small, unused courtyard below our fire escape, between the buildings, and a big, beautiful tree – is it an ash? – that's grown taller than any of the former tenement housing surrounding it. on a perfect summer day like today, a gentle cross-breeze blows through our entire apartment and keeps it remarkably cool.

right now that cross breeze was rancid with smoke.

i ran to the bedroom window and looked out. the smoke had been joined by bright orange flames that were reaching up and around the lip of the neighbor's basement window. up and into the courtyard. for a split second i was glassy eyed. the orange from below contrasted with the black steel grating of our fire escape looked more like a firepit grill, i thought, than a terrible emergency.

instantly there was motion and action and movement in our apartment. i called 911. rob and laurin were gathering things up to go outside. i ran to the living room to throw on a pair of shoes. we shifted from “it’s not as bad as it looks” to “we’ve got to get out of here” as rapidly as the fire seemed to grow.

then the screaming started.

“help me! help me! please!!!”

no, that wasn’t real. someone was kidding. they just need to calm down. what were they yelling about? this is just like a movie, i thought.

“oh my god!” rob yelled from the bedroom.

a young woman was now perched on her third story window sill, just across the courtyard, with a man standing behind her, leaning far out on her left. other windows in the building had been blown out, and the strength of the heat coming up toward our own bedroom window was growing.

“i have no fire escape! i’m going to die!” she was screaming.

then i saw her face.

now it was real.

rob was leaning out onto our fire escape, and the woman was edging further out onto the sill of her window, preparing to jump.

continued...

a new york city night

wisconsin candy from a stranger

more lunacy from the milwaukee journal-sentinal:

As in the Elmbrook School District, teachers in the Wauwatosa School District will not be showing President Barack Obama's speech to America's schoolchildren live on Tuesday. Chris Preisler, communications director for the Wauwatosa School District, confirmed that his district's superintendent notified building principals Thursday the district would tape the speech so teachers could view it later and determine whether they want to use it in their classrooms or not.

and then there's this bit of history, from politifact:

President George H.W. Bush gave an address to schools nationwide in 1991, from a junior high school in Washington, D.C. News reports from the time said the White House hoped that the address would be shown at schools nationwide, and Bush began his remarks by saying he was talking to "millions" of students "in classrooms all across the country."

and the hero of the right, ronald reagan, was anything but non-political when he had the chance to talk to the nation's students:

We also found that Ronald Reagan took questions from high school students at the White House in 1986, and the question-and-answer session was broadcast nationally.

Reagan urged the students to stay in school and say no to drugs, but he also discussed overtly political matters, such as national defense funding, nuclear disarmament and -- in surprising policy detail -- taxes. (Read Reagan's complete remarks.)

Later in the session, a student asked Reagan what he considered his greatest achievement as president. Reagan said it was that the House and Senate had separately passed legislation cutting taxes, and he was looking forward to seeing the legislation finalized and become law.

people need to start asking this question: how did my school district handle george bush's speech to american students in '91? how did they handle ronald reagan's in '86? and why are they treating this president any differently?

don't take candy from strangers, ctd.

"we haven't received one positive phone call or email," a colorado school administrator said earlier this week, referring to president barack obama's upcoming address to students. (the school system did report 40 to 50 calls against airing the speech, however.)

imagine that dinner table conversation: "honey, i guess i'd better get on the horn to billy's school tomorrow morning to let them know i want billy to hear the president's speech."

why would there be a positive call? most folks just assume (and agree) that hey, the president is giving a speech to young people, they'll play it at school. this is good. he's the president. even when there was grumbling from democrats about bush 41's speech to kids and reagan's too, it didn't rise to this level of silliness.

well, david baron and cory goodrich of pleasant hill, illinois have taken that positive step. they have each sent letters to the local school district, asking that obama's speech be heard:

SUBJECT: Please air Obama's speech to the children

Dear District 200 School Board,

I am a father of a Pleasant Hill student and a tax payer for Wheaton District 200 and I am writing to express outrage at District 200's decision to ban President Obama's planned message to school children. I believe that the President should be heard regardless of the message. We must come together as a community and as a nation to help this country flourish.

The speech will be made available before the airing. Please review it then, prepare a response if necessary, and air the speech for the children. This is an educational opportunity for the children, not a means of political censorship.

Remember last fall during the election? You helped our children get involved in the political process. You allowed them to make their own choice, to vote. Those who voted in Pleasant Hill were excited to be involved and to exercise their freedoms in school as they will one day as an adult.

Please just air it and denounce those who would like to use this opportunity for political gain.

Respectfully,

David Barron

____________________


A Letter To The School District

As the mother to a Pleasant Hill child, I am writing to express my concern and disappointment at District 200's decision to ban President Obama's planned educational message to school children, under the thinly veiled guise of concerns for not being able to preview the contents of the speech.

In these times of political turmoil, it is more important than ever to come to a place of peace between the parties. Education, the eradication of ignorance, the important message of staying in school and participating in our government to create a future we can ALL be proud of, should be common ground and a place to come together.

Unfortunately, some political factions have chosen have chosen to use this as a platform for spreading lies and derisiveness and disrespect for the leaders of our country. I am saddened that District 200 has decided to participate in this fiasco and has become a political pawn.

I am also saddened that my daughter and her peers will be denied an educational opportunity that could encourage them to be excited about learning, and is a direct bipartisan message to THEM from the President of the United States.

Consequently, I will be taking her home to watch the speech.

We had a unique opportunity this last election, to witness our children's excitement about the election process. I have never witnessed so many children so curious and involved in politics and I think this participation in government is an important and empowering lesson for them. Unfortunately, the door is being slammed in their faces once again and it dismays me that an educational institution would participate in the silencing of a generation.

While I applaud your decision to make several DVD copies of the speech available (to a district that contains 20 schools), I am disappointed in your choice to unilaterally ban the speech from its intended audience.

Education banishes ignorance. Censorship fosters it.

Respectfully,

Cory Goodrich

quote of the day

"The most important thing is the public option. I don't know for sure if I would support it with out a public option but it would be hard to get there.... We're not going through this to write some namby pamby bill so we can check a box and say we did health care reform."

– Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH)

the la crosse wisconsin death panels

who would have thought what's turned into "pulling the plug on granny" and "obama death panels" all started in a hospital in lacrosse, wisconsin?

gundersen lutheran, the largest hospital in lacrosse, began discussing end-of-life issues with patients and their families in the mid-1980s:

"We'd turn to the family and say, 'We need your input. If your mother or father could speak now, what would they tell you?' And the family would say, 'If we only knew,' " said [hospital official Bud] Hammes, 59. "I could see the distress. They were going to have to live with themselves, with the worry about making a mistake.

This was unacceptable."

so the docs at gundersen then began counseling families about health care directives, living wills, and appointing a health care agent. they wanted folks to discuss these issues with their families when they were healthy.

it worked well. friends talked to friends and the idea spread. soon, folks in their 60's were drawing up directives to spare their children from making agonizing decisions when the time came. the community embraced the concept and does to this day.

gunderson brought this idea to some senators and congressmen, and they all agreed: this type of counseling should be available to everyone who wants it.

then came sarah palin's facebook page:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care.

Such a system is downright evil.

call your cousin in la crosse and ask her how evil a living will is.

or better yet, let me tell you.

without a living will, a health care directive, and a physician who was willing to sit down and discuss these things at length, the end of my partner steve's life could have been much, much different.

along the way there were plenty of major decisions that needed to be made, most at the drop of a hat: at 4:00 in the morning, in a tiny madison, wisconsin hospital room suddenly packed with nurses, doctors and orderlies in what resembled the marx brother's stateroom scene from a night at the opera; late on a breezy friday night, sitting in our milwaukee apartment, the windows wide open, laughing until our stomachs ached, having just finished off two pints of kopp's frozen custard; in the middle of a long holiday weekend, when that same physician was not as easily accessible and a doctor who was a total stranger to both of us was actually turning to me for guidance.

if you were a bystander, you would have thought i made those decisions, in the moment. i most certainly did not. these were things steve and i had discussed in great detail, many with his doctor. even if i wasn't prepared for every situation, i knew the answers to the questions.

shortly after steve's death, my dad suggested he and i have a long talk. he wanted to be sure father and son "were on the same page" about certain things. dad and i revisit the subject every so often, and it's clear to me what he wants. it isn't scary, it isn't morose, it isn't sad. it's empowering, and if anything – life affirming.

how many people will get to that crucial moment with a parent, a spouse, a grandparent, and simply have to guess.