Citizen Poet

It is the losing of one’s health

That kills; not the loss of one’s wealth.

  Disasters, like the execution of a sentence to be hanged come the dawn, have a remarkable way of focusing one’s mind. And events in the past few days have really focused my mind. One was a house fire–no one hurt, no structural damage, but lots of smoke damage and chemical residue from the fire extinguishers–and the other was an injury to my knee that an x-ray yesterday revealed as a torn meniscus over the right tibia, possibly one of the most painful injuries I have ever suffered in my life.

  I spend a great deal of my life thinking about and observing events that provide source material for axioms, epigrams, and short poetic homilies on life events from comic to tragic, dull to exhilarating, truly amusing to horrific–and like the Chinese proverb that says if one sits by a river long enough, one will see the body of his enemy float by, it has also been observed that if waits long enough, almost any damn thing will happen. We just do not expect them to happen to us, the bad things anyway.

  One can deal with calamity

  If it is another’s tragedy.

  Of course, the rational thing to do is add a third line– "By offering sympathy"–and hope that we can avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time ourselves.

  A couple of weeks ago I overdid a bit of physical activity and was feeling a persistent pain in my right knee, just enough to be aggravating but not enough to warrant a trip to the doctor. Like all trivial traumas that occur to self-confident, ex-82nd airborne males who sneer at injuries short of amputation and laughed at the discomfort, it met the rubrics of self-medication with Tullamore Dew. And anyway, people who are whiners annoy the hell out of me and I have no desire to join the league of self-pleasuring pain junkies.

  Some people are only comfortable,

  Complaining on being miserable.

  And it almost worked except for the fire–and the heat. For several days, the area north of Boston where I live had been basted in an unusual New England heat wave. Each day had been hot and dry, baking our older New England farm house, a sturdy wood frame, modified Cape Cod that has undergone multiple remodeling over the years. In one of the early room additions that occurred before we bought the house, the wiring to an electrical panel adjacent to the kitchen had been split between a new garage and a new panel in the basements. Instead of running new wires or romex, the old and new wires had been spliced together with wirenuts and electrical tape, which tends to dry and waste away after twenty years in a sealed space subjected to extremes of hot and cold.

  My wife and I were in an upstairs bedroom with our three cats and the door closed to relax in the room air conditioner and watch a movie. I thought I smelled smoke and came downstairs. I not only smelled smoke, I could see it the moment I entered the kitchen. It seemed to be coming from the baseboard. I felt the walls. It was hot right above the stove, which I checked quickly. It was on low, heating a roast in a Dutch oven. I turned it off and I looked around for the fire extinguisher which usually hangs on a hook next to the rear door. The extinguisher was missing.

  Although I did not see flames at this point, I knew that where there was smoke, it was best to be prepared. I ran to the bottom of the stairs and yelled up to Carol that there was smoke in the kitchen. She yelled back. I yelled back, go out the window. The rear bedroom window exits over the rear exercise and hot room, then over the enclosed swimming pool–a handy fire evacuation route that avoids having to come downstairs.

   I ran to the living room fireplace, hoping to find the extinguisher there. It was not, but then I remembered we had taken outside to be near the grill for the previous day’s barbeque. I charged back through the kitchen. This time I saw flames. The wood paneling behind the stove was smoldering. I pulled the stove away from the wall and yanked out the power cord.

  I raced to the back porch, grabbed the extinguisher, and spun around much too fast; my right foot was going in one direction, my body in another and my arms obeying the physics of motion and direction. Less than a minute had probably passed since I first spotted the smoke and was back in the kitchen, and by then, the metal dispenser filled with olive oil on the counter next to the kitchen had burst into flames.

  I pulled the pin and sprayed the counter and stove. The spray actually smelled worse and was more acrid than the black smoke. All of the smoke alarms in the house were beeping like crazy. I heard Carol’s voice calling me from the top of the stairs. So, I yelled back at her to use the second-floor bedroom exit and get out. And then, in the back of mind, I had this crazy thought. Why hadn’t our house alarm system called the fired department yet? The thing has a sensor in every room of the house and is wired to automatically call our monitoring company in the event of break-in and fires, and to trigger an outside siren and flashing light at the same time.

  The olive oil container burst back into flames. Too much heat I thought. My eyes were burning and my throat was dry. I grabbed a stainless steel mixing bowl off the pot rack and slammed it over the oil bottle. Slipping on our kitchen mitts, I slid a pizza pan under the oil can and bowl, flipped it and headed to the logia door next to the garage, where I ran outside and laid it on the paved driveway. The moment I back away, it started burning again.

  I quickly looked around. We live in a pretty remote area and there was no one around, which was good since outside and totally naked–not that I really cared at that point anyway. I went back through the garage and killed the power to the kitchen. At this point, I had no idea it was an electrical short that caused the fire so I left power on to the other rooms to keep the overhead fans going. I an axe and a crowbar and headed back to the kitchen, flinging open windows.

  The wall had warped where the panel seams had charred. I sprayed more extinguisher stuff into the gap and then carefully pulled the wallboard open with the crowbar. More extinguisher stuff. The smoke was beginning to dissipate so I went back to the logia porch and drank in some fresh air. Carol was downstairs now. "You’re naked," she said.

  "I know," I said. "I wasn’t sure how to dress for a fire. Why aren’t you outside?"

  "The cats were under the bed. I stuffed a towel under the door. I told them we would have to out the window if it got any worse."

  We have to talk later, I thought. Back in the kitchen, the smoking had stopped, so I ran down to the basement and turned on the large house fan which was mainly designed to purge the basement of radon, but it strong enough to suck air from the third floor all the way to the basement and then out. After only about ten minutes, most of smoke was gone although I was sure the house was going to smell like a barbeque pit for a month.

Everything in the kitchen was covered with a fine white powder, from cabinets to appliances to pots and pans and lids and cat dishes, and well–it’s a country home and a country kitchen. My biggest regret was the bread basket and the butter crock.

  I found an old electrical box inside the kitchen wall and a bunch of wires with charred black goop, but more disturbing was the wads of Kraft paper that been stuffed into the cavity as filler. We bought the house from the original contractor who built, lived and remodeled the structure for some seventeen years, and while some things were done exceedingly well, he proved the adage that the shoemaker’s sons go barefoot. Among his successes, foundation walls and 2×6 framing that would hold up a tavern; among the failures, no doors on the closets (which we added) and several unfinished rooms.

  Monday and Tuesday were eaten up by insurance questions, replacement and repair, and of course, basic cleanup. As to the whole house fire alarm, the culprit there was a faulty diode in the monitor panel. Turned out we had an old style electronic detector that was triggered when the amperage in a sensor circuit increase beyond a certain value, but in this case, the faulty diode kept the current at exactly the same level no matter what the sensors saw. A quick test and that was replaced. And, of course, the illegal wiring that we had to pull and replace.

  What some regard as destiny,

  Is actually stupidity.

  Had x-rays taken on Tuesday and met with the doctor on Wednesday, confrim the torn meniscus. A shot of coritsone was administered directly into the joint, which had to be as close to being branded by a hot iron as am likely to come this side of hell. Three to six weeks of Ace bandages and lightening the load on my feet should cure the tear. One shot of good news was that the x-rays revealed very little arthiritis, so I should be back to jogging in a couple of months.

As for the cats, they eventually came out from under the bed and displayed all of the proper feline indignation at having had their afternoon nap so rudely interrupted.

  And for some reason, I escaped hanging for yet another day. I am, however, not entirely confident about tomorrow.

  I believe over confidence

  Is either sheer incompetence

  Or purely outright ignorance.