Mark's B'day Tale

Happy Birthday, Sally!

I haven’t written this until now in part because I’ve been busy, and in part because it was traumatic and embarrassing. It’s sort of funny, from a distance, but I still wasn’t particularly looking forward to reliving it. Be that as it may, here is my contribution to Sally’s Memory Book:

I was up early on Haydee’s mother’s 80^th birthday, 8:30 my time but 5:30 a.m. in Florida. Early enough to maybe do something useful, I had actually purchased a wire brush so I could scrape and paint her wrought iron front gate. She is such a beautiful person and opened her home up to us; I was hoping to do something nice in return. So I tiptoed downstairs for a little precious alone time with just me, my book, a fresh cup of coffee, and the beautiful sunrise over the lake.

Sally’s custom is to dry what few dishes accumulate by stacking them on the electric stove. The back burner had nothing on it, so I filled a pan with water and turned on the heat. “I’ll put those dishes away as the coffee filters, that way I won’t overflow anything. I’ll be right here so nothing will make a mess. It’ll be perfect.” As Pete’s (or perhaps Jill’s) plastic travel mug began melting into the glowing red burner, I opened the drapes to the new day, picked up my novel, and eased myself into the rocker in front of the sliding glass door. Perhaps as many as five minutes later, a flicker of light caught my attention.

The flames were nearly two feet tall, not quite licking the white exhaust hood over the stove, as dense, viscous, oily, evil black clouds of smoke billowed out from the stove like demons on a mission to foul the entire house. Confronted with a flaming ball of molten plastic, I faced the emergency like any red blooded American male: I ran around in a panic like a toddler with a shirt full of bees. For some reason I focused on the smoke. After turning off the burner, (about the only thing I did right), I ran to open the sliding glass door. The latch on Sally’s sliding glass door is a marvel of modern engineering; it knows if you are in a hurry. I actually got it open on the first try, but forgot the stick that acts a safeguard. Once the stick was gone, however, I couldn’t open that *&#$^@! thing again for love or money. Time ticked by. Smoke billowed.

Things get mixed up in my mind after that; I was thoroughly flustered. I remember most of what happened, but I’m sort of guessing at a timeline. I scurried back to the stove, and turned on the fume hood. I finally wrestled the back door open and got both front doors open. Somewhere in this continuing tragicomedy, the smoke alarm chimed in and I had to take time to disable it lest the whole house discover the shambles I was making of the downstairs. I finally got back to the stove and tried to figure out a way to deal with the conflagration still raging there. Part of the problem was that nothing at my disposal was mine to ruin, and I knew I had to ruin something in order to remove the mess. I eventually grabbed the blazing lump with a dishtowel, chucked it in the sink and doused it with the spray nozzle. This is when the extent of the soot really hit home. I noticed it before but I had been preoccupied by the actual fire. Approximately seventy bazillion black soot particles the size of little exclamation points were wafting their way around the first floor! Being ever so slightly heavier than air most of the particles settled near the source, but some of them floated to the far corners, settling on furniture, family photos, curtains, plants, books, knick-knacks, literally everything…

As I surveyed the devastation, I recalled a conversation with Sally from a previous day; she was lamenting that it aggravated her to have people move things around in her house. I knew that to have even a remote hope of fixing this, I would absolutely have to move EVERY SINGLE THING IN THE ENTIRE DOWNSTAIRS. Even then it would be touch and go. Happy birthday Sally! A puff of air would dislodge the soot leaving no trace; but if it got touched, say wiped or brushed or sat on, each little speck would leave an indelible half-inch smear that could only be removed with straight dishwashing detergent, (I discovered this by cleaning the fume hood). I started cleaning, which essentially meant taking everything that wasn’t nailed down outside and blowing it off, the stuff that was nailed down got carefully vacuumed and I would mop the floor last of all. Because of the meticulous nature of the clean up I knew this would be a tedious process.

I also knew the house would soon be teeming with the young boys and various others in search of breakfast, coffee, etc. Ian was the first one down, and he was miffed that his morning routine was upset. Even the thought of breakfast out was little consolation, but after some juice in a red cup and a full mea culpa on my part he was fine, as was the rest of Pete’s family. Haydee was another story. Don’t get me wrong; she was invaluable in helping to return things to normal. But she didn’t pitch in with the light heart and inexhaustible optimism one looks for in these trying situations. The laughter in her eyes was absent. For some reason she seemed annoyed that her mother’s house had nearly burned down on her 80^th birthday; annoyed at me of all people! Actually, her attitude was quite understandable and she relented as soon as it looked like things would clean up o.k. She even let me go golfing.

Less understandable was Sally’s cheerfulness. She seemed to take it all in stride, as though houseguests routinely set fire to her kitchen. Her faith in me was daunting; she was convinced before I was that we could restore everything. She wasn’t thrilled about the idea of breakfast out either, but she was calm, pleasant, and encouraging as we hauled everything outside, blowing, scrubbing, and vacuuming as needed. There was soot on every horizontal surface on the lower floor of her house, and I was amazed at how many surfaces there were: baseboards, picture frames, door and cabinet trim, there was even soot inside the cabinets. After we were done and I took a shower it was as though I was rinsing black dye out of my hair, it left a dark ring in the tub. That was the biggest stain on an otherwise great trip.