What do you treasure?
Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 7:55AM The Boston Globe has a great web page called The Big Picture where they post really great series of news-related photographs.
This week's entry is a series of 41 photos of the California wildfires and, as always, the photos are remarkably compelling - the sort of photos that make you just sit and stare at them while your mind either goes blank or thinks a dozen things at once.
(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
My mind went back to this week, three years ago - September 1, 2006. It was less than a week before I was starting my second semester of grad school and my first semester of teaching. I was living on the fourth floor of an apartment complex in south Jersey and the building right next to mine caught on fire. The sirens and engine sounds of fire trucks woke me up at 5am and I peered through the blinds to see a five-alarm fire. The news helicopters swirled overhead as I panicked and tried to figure out what I would grab if the fire leapt the 50 feet from that building to mine.
As embers started to land on my patio, I threw the following items into my laundry basket: essential clothing, my computer, my purse, my school books, and my cell phone. I put Oreo's leash on her and headed outside to scope out what was happening on the ground. Thankfully, the fire never moved to my building. However, the poor folks who lived in the burnt building were terribly unlucky. Most of them lost everything and the apartment complex did next to nothing to help them. I moved out two weeks later, into a much nicer complex down the road.
There was one particular item in my purse that day, though - one seemingly small item that I grabbed specifically because I wanted to save it should the fire reach my apartment and force Oreo and me to flee: a three-inch button pin photo of my dad and me, taken in Central Park when I was three or four years old.
It's one of a kind. I'll never be that age again and neither will my dad. Who knows if we'll ever be in Central Park together again? I don't have the negative, so I could never print another. I feel so lucky that I've managed to hold onto it this long, through all these years, through a dozen moves.
My dad was a professional photographer at the time, shooting weddings, bar mitzvahs, and so on. There are so many pictures of my siblings and I as children that I don't have a particular sentimental attachment to many photos because I'm used to having just so many of them.
But my dad was always behind the camera. Now that we're older and wield our own cameras, he gets caught in our pictures. But when I was a kid, it was rare.
But that's not entirely why I love this little button. I actually can't put into words why I love it so much, which I think is the best kind of love sometimes. Being someone so attached to and in love with words, it's when words fail me that I stop and hold on.
What do you hold onto? What would you save if your home caught on fire? What treasures do you keep? Share your treasure with Genie Alisa's Life Out Loud (LOL) Project.
Reader Comments (5)
Wow good question! The house next to my parents' home burnt down not long ago (it actually caught on fire twice in the same night. The firemen didn't get it out all the way the first time and luckily my parents' dog woke up and started barking later in the night after hearing it start up again...).
I would grab :
Shane
Luna (which could be hard because cats hide when scared)
cell phone
laptop
my wedding rings
my journals (which I should probably keep in a place that's easy to grab)
since our family has a DVD of our wedding pictures I can't think of anything else that I would HAVE to have....
I love your picture because of the smile on your dad's face and the way he's holding you tight.
Yup. That's my dad. :) And I forgot to point out that he's actually wearing his camera in the picture, too... always the photog, even when IN a picture.
There are some things that words fail, you are right. Or I fail to be able to put them into words. I'm glad you got your button. Are you an English teacher? I am. I am thinking we might have much in common.
That is an adorable picture. I haven't given good & serious thought to what I would take out of my house in a fire in some time... maybe I should do that.
I was actually traumatized for life by one of those fire safety videos in elementary school. There was a little kid trying to get her giant stuffed dog to fit out the window and her dad wouldn't let her take it, like some kind of object lesson on getting yourself to safety first. I just remember being like, "no way, I'd get my stuffed dog out of the house, jerks."