Fire Drill

I hope we make it out of this mess.

My comfy chair is a fat cavernous swivel armchair, slipcovered long ago in a milquetoast brown check for some neutral family basement scheme. I’ve been dragging it along with me like a favorite blankie for many years now. I keep hoping to re-cover it with a fresh fabric. I’m not foolish enough to think that a much hipper piece of furniture can replace it; it is too comfortable. But I had hoped it would make it on to this year’s refreshment list. Didn’t happen. No biggie.

I have removed the back cushion so that my laptop and I can fit, cross-legged, completely within it. I burrow in, with a footstool stacked with books and seed catalogues to the right, and a small chest with more books and a reading lamp (and room for my tea and chocolate chips and reading glasses and colored pencils) to the left.

But tonight I stood up and dragged the heavy armchair closer to the hearth. Because my husband built and lit a fire, the first in a long while. Farmer did not like fire. There was no Rockwell-esque sleeping-dog-by-the-fire situation going on here. At the mere hint of a fire – my husband bringing wood inside or balling up newspaper – he would begin to whine and pace. So that was that.

We recently rearranged the furniture (at my husband’s suggestion, which made my jaw drop) in our small open living room/dining room in such a way that naturally creates a foyer, which we have long badly needed. It also places the couch squarely facing the fireplace. The whole seating arrangement is now fireplace-centric in fact.

The only problem with this is that the actual fireplace is quite ugly – unless it has a fire going in it. Then you don’t really notice its detriments, which include its brickwork, the mantel, the black smoke stains – pretty much everything about it. But hey, it is a working fireplace with a flue that opens and closes, so I should not be dissing it. (And if you live in New England and journey through five months of dark, cold, and damp, you really appreciate a live fire.)

Of course, wood smoke is not the healthiest thing to inhale (all kinds of juicy studies on that recently), but apparently if you burn a hot fire, the tiny particles combust more thoroughly.

And this fire my husband is feeding tonight with more and more wood is very hot. Hot hot hot. The pile of glowing embers below the grate looks like the spoils of a live volcano, molten and devilish.

I am mesmerized by the dancing flames and the tiny shooting sparks following the draft up while the embers drop down — the physics and the chemistry of it all. The smell of wood smoke is serotonin to me. I don’t know why. I think the feelings must be primal, passed along from Homo erectus to Homo heidelbergensis to Homo sapiens. (Did you know that sapiens means “wise” or “intelligent?” Now there’s a misnomer if I ever heard one. Perhaps we will be renamed Homo neglegens (careless) by some future, hopefully wiser, genetic improvement. If Homo makes it that long.)

Sorry to be snide. But sitting here, I feel like I’ve won the lottery. And yet. I have everything I need to be happy (to repeat my father’s favorite quote): someone to love, something to do, something to hope for.

But the “hope for” part is problematic, depending on what day, hour or minute it is. Like many of you, I feel as if there is an undercurrent of sadness and anxiety running almost constantly through our lives these days. An unrelenting scratchy noise, like tinnitus of the soul.

Bearing witness to very public tragedies – one right after the other – is a collective trauma.

I can’t help thinking about all the people who will be mourning loved ones this year during the holidays. Sure, I know, people die all the time. (Remind me not to marry a lawyer in my next life; he’s always presenting me with the facts.)

But I am not okay with it. My death – that’s different. I’m already on my second life, the one that started 19 years ago on December 25 when I put down a glass of red wine at the end of the evening, having started the day with a Scotch.

Because I was given the chance – the invitation, really – to live an authentic life, to pursue spiritual enlightenment, and to learn to live with myself as I am, I will die grateful (and hopefully still sober) if I die tomorrow.

I’m only 63, but my husband will turn 75 in January. Time has already started to move at fast-forward for us. Every day, I think about my dad (who I will see very soon) – 95 years and six months on this planet. It must all be a blur for him at this point. But at least the film is still running.

But what about the 10-year-old (and many others) who died from a gunshot wound on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, this week? Or the two young Brown University students, shot dead in a classroom? Oh, I know death is tragic at any age. But children and young people are precious. They deserve a turn at this crazy life.

Ever since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, I’ve been aghast at the selfish, inhumane thinking that justifies semi-automatic rifles – and the proliferation of handguns.

But now it’s not just guns that are dangerous. The rhetoric is a real killer.

Of course, the rhetoric is not new. My biggest objection to T—p from Day 1, all those many years ago, was that giving him a voice was like handing the megaphone to a gutter rat so that he could call all the rest of the rats out of the sewer. Plus, the chief rat always needs lieutenants. Those are some very special rats – the enablers, the most heinous of all. (I do feel like I’m being a bit unfair to rats.)

But now the chief rat seems to have eaten the arsenic and has started to go batshit-crazy. Though to be fair to the rats (again), I’m not sure narcissism is necessarily a rat trait. So, what we have here is a man who started out being the world’s most insecure narcissist and then stared at the reflecting pool for so long that he’s now in danger of falling in. Rats do not do well in water.

But while he’s still on the precipice, we have to endure the ratcheting up of the vitriolic rhetoric, which seemingly has no boundaries: gaslighting, graft, bribery, incivility, lack of empathy, misogyny and the abuse of women and children, antisemitism, extreme xenophobic racism, the debunking of scientific research and the reversal of medical progress, gross disregard for humanitarian needs, deceitful lies (tautology intended), illegal and inhumane detainment, manipulation of the law, maligning the dead, the rewriting of history, the disrespect of former American presidents and members of the military, the trashing of decades of global partnerships, warmongering — and on and on.

None of this bodes well for our country. You can’t have an unstable leader and a stable citizenry at the same time. The effect is global, too — the rest of the world is watching the U.S. sinking and hoping they don’t go down with the ship. It would be nice if only the rats drowned, but that’s not how it works.

Am I hopeful that the ship is going to change course before it hits the rocks? Not entirely – and I won’t drag this painful metaphor out any longer. While some of the damage already done will be reversible, many changes have created and will continue to create suffering for a long time to come. (Then there’s that whole deep cultural divide problem – I’ll just leave that there for right now.)

What’s important is that people continue to stand up to the rhetoric and say, “This is not acceptable.”

There are many ways to do that. Exhibit A from this week, which made me a proud magazine editor: the photos Vanity Fair published of the “junkyard dogs” (their words, not mine; taken from a staff quote). Otherwise known as T—p’s inner circle.

Christopher Anderson is a brilliant photojournalist, using documentary photography to tell the truth. But he wouldn’t have had the final say on which photographs were published. Only the magazine editors and pubisher have control over that – and the story (backed up by taped interviews) that went with it. I will spare you my evaluation of the photos – there’s lots of that all over the internet. But I can assure you, as a magazine editor, none of it was accidental.

Kudos to them, and here’s to keeping the fire burning. Maybe it will send the rats scampering back to the sewer.🔥