sunday 8 august 1976

Where was Dad? I kept looking around for him during church, and I could tell my mom was looking for him too.

Where is Dad? I asked her.
I don’t know, she said.

In all the Sundays of my nine years on the planet -- well, in all the Sundays I was old enough to remember – my whole family sat together in church. My mom and dad, I, my brother (5½) and my sister (4) always went to Sunday school, then to church, then visited with people in the foyer afterward, then had lunch with my grandparents.

My grandpa was preaching and my grandma was sitting in the second pew on the left-hand side. Everyone was present and accounted for except my dad. And my mom, who was kind of irritated when I asked her about it again, definitely didn’t know where he was.

After the service ended, social hour began in the foyer but my dad suddenly appeared. His face was stern. He motioned for me to come with him. Now.

With few words he gathered my mom and siblings. “Don, you come too,” he said to a 20-something man who had been living in our basement for a few weeks. He was going through a hard time and trying to save up some money to get on his feet. He went to our church but drove to services on his own.

We hustled into the station wagon and drove about a half-mile down Springfield Road. Dad turned into the new Fondulac Park and pulled to a stop. He cut the engine and turned with his right elbow over the back of the seat.

“I have some terrible news,” he said. “While we were at church, our house burned.”

It was very quiet in the car. Someone asked if the house was still standing. “Yes, but it looks very bad. There is a lot of smoke and fire damage.” There was another long quiet spell.

“Don, you lost everything,” my dad said.

My mom said she wanted to go home. So my dad started the car and we began the drive across the river. It was completely silent as we crossed the Murray Baker Bridge. No one said a word. No one wailed or spoke. I heard my mom sniff a few times. All I could think of was, how bad was it? I thought of how my parents spent just last night putting the new wallpaper up in our kitchen. And I thought of what my dad told Don: You lost everything.

From the bottom of our street we could see the fire trucks, the firemen and all our neighbors gathered around. The front yard was a mess. The house did look terrible -- all coated with soot and dirt. The whole area was wet and smelled bad. I looked at my bedroom windows -- there was blackness around them.

The fire had started in a TV set in the basement. The heat was so intense it melted the phone on the nearby wall. The handset stretched all the way down to the floor. We couldn’t believe it. The basement was full of water when we saw it that first day – and all of Don’s stuff was floating. The TV was on a high shelf, so its flames burned through the basement ceiling and the living room floor. There was a hole so big you could drop a piano through it. And the smoke was so intense, it looked like black water had seeped down all the walls. The smoke stained everything: pages of books, tabletops, counters, mirrors, carpet, curtains.

I honestly don’t remember anything from that afternoon except our neighbors comforting us, especially my sister, who was very upset. I remember we went to our neighbors to make some phone calls. And I remember I got to go spend the next few nights at my friend Suzanne’s.

Her mom washed some of my clothes and the stuffed frog that I slept with every night. I think that was the first night I’d ever slept without it, but it just reeked of smoke. Before we went to sleep we got to go into Suzanne’s parents’ bedroom to watch the news. There was a drawing of a house with flames and the word “FIRE” on the screen behind the anchor, who said our name and how much damage the fire had caused.

After a few days I went to live with my grandparents, whose house was just one block from mine. When school started a few weeks later, I could ride my regular bus and see my parents when they came over each day to work on the house. They, along with my brother and sister, were living in a motel and that’s where I spent weekends. I loved living with my grandparents and I loved going to stay at the motel on the weekends. Our room had French doors and there was a TV in the bedroom!

Finally we got to move back into our house and I got to redecorate my room with selections from the JCPenney catalog. We had Thanksgiving and Christmas there in 1976 and every year since. On hot, humid days, we still smelled that smoke on the upper floors of the house. Over time, it went away. If you went to the house today, you’d never know what happened there 30 years ago -- unless you opened to the smoke-color page of the hymnal that had been open on the piano that morning.