combustible memories
I am acquainted with a couple who were vacationing in Nepal when the Oakland Hills burned in 1991, taking out their home and about 3500 others. The internet was not yet a commercial phenomenon in those days, meine Kinder, and mobile communication technologies in their rather bulky infancy, so my chums were not exactly keeping current with the news as they hiked and explored out in distant Woglandia. When their son picked them up at San Francisco Airport upon their return, they asked him “Anything happen while we were gone?” “You could say,” he replied.
The house, goods, chattel were all a total loss, I gather, with not so much as a scrap of paper saved. Talking about it a couple of years later, one of them said that while they’d as soon it had never happened, the loss of everything was strangely liberating. “We’ll never accumulate so much stuff again,” she said. As I look around my cluttered study, crammed to the rafters with the books, files, equipment I transported here last month from BDS—a python attempting to digest a largish porcupine—I feel wistful, though not sufficiently so to take up arson as a retirement hobby.
I got the sense that A is disposed to be philosophical about the likely loss of his cottage, although he sounded wistful about a couple of oscilloscopes. I’d cross my fingers for his place, but the efficacy of the gesture is unproven; I have never heard even anecdotal accounts that it is effective ex post facto; it becomes damnably difficult to type with one’s digits so arranged.
ashes to Ashton, dust to debris,
The house, goods, chattel were all a total loss, I gather, with not so much as a scrap of paper saved. Talking about it a couple of years later, one of them said that while they’d as soon it had never happened, the loss of everything was strangely liberating. “We’ll never accumulate so much stuff again,” she said. As I look around my cluttered study, crammed to the rafters with the books, files, equipment I transported here last month from BDS—a python attempting to digest a largish porcupine—I feel wistful, though not sufficiently so to take up arson as a retirement hobby.
I got the sense that A is disposed to be philosophical about the likely loss of his cottage, although he sounded wistful about a couple of oscilloscopes. I’d cross my fingers for his place, but the efficacy of the gesture is unproven; I have never heard even anecdotal accounts that it is effective ex post facto; it becomes damnably difficult to type with one’s digits so arranged.
ashes to Ashton, dust to debris,
