Last time I told you about house and trashcan fires. This time I want to tell you about the stove, fire reflections on the wall, hook and ladder trucks, burning orchards, and why I no longer want to be in charge of fire safety. Our kitchen in Echo Park was huge, or so it seemed to me, because you had to take a long walk between the stove and the kitchen counter in order to dump eggshells in the sink. It’s not that we weren’t smart enough to put a trash receptacle next to the stove. It’s that on one side of the stove was a wall and on the other side was the swinging door. You know, the kind they had in houses that were built before they invented gas appliances. You smacked someone in the face when you walked out of the kitchen to the dining room, and you slammed the door against the stove when you walked into the kitchen. I inherited this stove when I was 12. That’s when my mother and father started working at the bar and coming home at odd hours. I was expected to cook my father’s dinner. There were two impediments: I didn’t know how to cook and I didn’t know how to work the stove. When I asked my mother to teach me how to cook, she replied that if I was going to be in the kitchen cooking, she was going to go sit down in the living room and have a rest. So I had to figure things out from memory. I remembered my mother standing in front of the stove, frying things in cast iron skillets. Therefore, my father’s diet for the next few years was lamb chops or steaks fried in Crisco or scrambled eggs cooked so hard the cat wouldn’t eat them. Also cans of green beans heated in a pan. I mastered the burners but I refused to go near the oven after the first try. Our stove was so old, there was no temperature control. Oh, there was a dial that controlled the gas flow into the oven, ranging from make toast to make charcoal, but you couldn’t set anything to 350 degrees and walk away. That wasn’t what terrified me. What turned me to jelly was that in order to light the oven you had to first turn that numberless dial to start the gas flowing, then get down on your knees, light a match, and stick your entire upper body into the oven, hoping to ignite the gas and get out before your hair caught fire and your eyebrows were gone forever. It only took one explosion to convince me that this oven and I would be enemies for life. I never tried lighting it again. Ironically enough, I managed to marry a man and give birth to a son who were each trained as Fire Marshals and occasionally set fire to their shirts or thumbnails. Remember when I told you about watching the wall in my parents’ bedroom at night to make sure Daddy wasn’t burning the house down? I did the same thing when my first husband took me to a Samoan family Fia Fia, or luau. We ate outside and then filed into an auditorium to watch clans compete at hulas and fire dances. While everyone else was busy enjoying the entertainment, I was busy making sure the fire sticks were completely out before the fire dancers left the stage. My vigilance was not in vain. One dancer couldn’t douse his fire stick so he walked offstage to take care of it behind the curtains. He managed set the curtains on fire.
I knew this because I was Old Eagle Eye studying firelight. When I saw the glare go up instead of down, I knew we were in trouble and it was my job to exit the theater as expeditiously as possible. The only problem was that my husband was the Fire Marshal. We stood up at the same time. He loudly announced, “Everyone remain calm and exit the theater one row at a time, starting with the first row.” Then he put his hand on top of my head and pushed me back down into my seat. From that point on, it was comedy Jack in the Box. I would pop up and he would push me back down while announcing which row could leave. Do I need to add we were near the back of the theater and the light behind the stage was growing brighter and brighter? You know those old fashioned air pumps, where you push up and down on a pole that looks like a shock absorber? That was us. I was the pump; my head was the handlebars. Up, down, until the auditorium was emptied. By then I saw that the folks backstage were putting out the fire. I also realized if he’d let me leap over him in frenzied flight the way I wanted, my husband would have lost control of the audience who were miraculously following his orders. It worked out okay, but to this day I refuse to attend an indoor luau with fire dancers unless I’m sitting next to the closest exit. You’d think I’d know enough to decline the position of Fire Marshal. I would have, except when I took a job as office manager for a company located on the fourth floor of a building, they didn’t tell me I’d be captain and have to go down with the ship, or in this case make sure everyone got out of the burning building before me. I was working for a group of computer programmers. This meant all the support staff had open cubicles in the middle of the office and all the programmers had dark cells without any windows where they could eat Twinkies and concentrate. Whenever the faulty fire alarm went off, I had no trouble gathering the flock in the middle and herding them down the stairwell but I had to rip each programmer reluctantly away from his keyboard before I could leave. The final straw happened when the building security guard knocked on our door, looking pasty pale with fear as the alarm was clanging. He told me there was a bomb threat on the sixth floor, and then rushed off to do his duty before he, too, could flee the building. This time the central herd lingered to gather their purses as I urgently pushed from behind. When I went back to gather the programmers they declared they were no longer going to play my game. I managed to drag each of them to a window and point to the four hook-and-ladder trucks down below. Each one said, “Huh, I guess it’s real” and sauntered out the office door. It took every ounce of energy I had to keep from screaming, “RUN!” Everyone who ever worked with me knew I would be the first one pushing them out the door in case of fire, toxic gas leaks, electrical shorts, or other emergencies I have known. They made fun of me. I was a reliable topic of humor. They had no idea how much self control I mustered to not use them as stepping stones in my desire to flee the neighborhood. I have sworn I will never again be in charge of fire safety. However, there was the time the abandoned avocado orchard behind our house caught fire the same night a young German girl who spoke no English was staying with us. After hearing our neighbor screaming “Fire! Fire” and looking through the dining room window at what appeared to be a holocaust just beyond our back fence, I hurried into the children’s bedroom to rouse them and herd them outside and into my old car. Our visitor grabbed her dictionary and was trying to find the German word for “fire” as she stumbled along, sleepy and confused. Then we reached the dining room and words were no longer needed. The girls screamed and rushed out. My 4-year old son wanted to stay and watch the show. Of course he did. Once the children were nested into the back seat of my old Chrysler, I returned to the house to gather up the pets. I pitched dogs and cats willy-nilly on top of the children and then debated about how to rescue the chickens. Nothing realistic came to mind, so I decided that, sadly, it would be roast chicken for dinner in the foreseeable future. As I was driving off to deposit children and pets somewhere safe before returning to battle the blaze, my Fire Marshal husband returned from his night shift, leaped out of his still moving vehicle, and headed for the water hose. No one got hurt that night, not even the chickens. Understandably, the young German girl was reluctant to return. It was pretty funny now that I think of it.