Terry Marotta:
Gratitude for What One Still Has

Peering into what was once the living room of my brothers-in-law’s house, I could hardly believe it was the same place where I’d been a guest just 30 hours before.

I had never seen what’s left after a house-fire before.

What remains of a sofa, say: a twisted metal framework only. Or of a white plastic lawn chair, that, not even inside the house but out on the patio: a Dali-esque sculpture of frozen strings, like the hot marshmallow that cools and stiffens on an ice cream sundae. What’s left of cherished family photos: Nothing. Nothing at all.

It was just two nights earlier that Rusty and Toby had hosted me in their cozy desert home. We’d spent hours remembering back over the years, the way people do when they’ve been friends forever.

Rusty in particular had spoken of how lucky he felt at almost 70 to have so many mementos of his boyhood in India. That photo of his parents there on the wall, for one example. This mahogany table inlaid with ivory, for another.

Both he and Toby were feeling especially reflective I think because of the sharp loss they had suffered some 20 months earlier when the second home they'd just purchased also burned, in the colossal wind-driven wildfire that effectively erased the small community of Summerhaven on Mt. Lemmon in the high cool Mountains overlooking Tucson.

I was standing car keys in hand and ready to drive back to my hotel that night as they said again how strangely fortunate it was that the Mt. Lemmon place was so new to them; nothing they loved was up there yet. They gestured around the room. "We still have all these things, you see, which mean so much to us."

And didn’t that sentence ring in my ears when less than 12 hours later their neighbor Simon called me in my hotel room to report that a faulty heater had sparked this second fire that reduced their warm home to this shell of stinking cinders.

I drove over to view the wreckage expecting to find them despondent, overwhelmed by shock at the very least.

Instead, I found them only subdued, and quietly organizing themselves for some emergency shopping, since all their clothes were gone now too.

Moments before Simon’s call had come, I'd been reading a poem about fire written by one Rad Smith, from Distant Early Warring, the collection he worked feverishly to finish after learning he was in the final stages of a terminal cancer.

"Before It’s Too Late" suggests we must remain philosophical, even when flames come to consume what he symbolically calls our very homes. Extending the metaphor, he goes on with heart-rending irony:

"Think of the expense" of maintaining a house anyway.

"Just the taxes. All those shutters to paint."

I was amazed to have this poem right in my hand. And when I showed it to Toby he said, "It's so true. It's the only way to live."

As for Rusty, he expressed his feelings some time later, in an email to all who care for them.

 "It could be months before the forlorn blackened remnants of our former home can be pulled down and carted away," it said. "In the meantime we’re determined to live and enjoy our lives a day at a time.

"After all, I’m going to have just one 71st year in my life and wouldn’t it be silly to waste it by being rushed and frazzled?"

It seemed good to offer this tale of gratitude for what one still has, or has already, and in this week especially, before the holidays’ insistent commercial promptings attempt to convince us we need more.

Write Terry at tmarotta@comcast.net or PO Box 270, Winchester, Mass., 01890.

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