Late Saturday night a fire broke out at the College Church of Christ. Based on what I know as I sit to write this on Monday, the fire was caused by an electrical problem involving the heating unit for the baptistery. The damage is severe enough to make the building unusable for the immediate present. During services at the Benson Auditorium on Sunday, Noel Whitlock quipped that this was not what he meant when he wanted to see the church on fire.
As soon as I learned about the blaze, my mind went back thirty years to the summer of 1983. It was the last day of the fifth grade, and when I got off the bus and climbed the steep street to my house, I saw two fire trucks parked in the driveway. For a brief moment, I had a flicker of excitement. Like many 11-year-olds, I went through a mild phase of pyromania, and whenever my next-door neighbor burned limbs in his back yard, I came running, eager to help him find more combustible stuff. I would have grabbed pieces of household furniture if he had let me. There was something about the crackle and red glow that I found mesmerizing.
That phase ended the minute I saw what a fire had done to our house. In those days, CB radio antennas were popular and my brother had one in a tree in our front yard. During a storm earlier that afternoon, lightning struck the antenna, came into the house and blew up the downstairs television. My mother was upstairs about to have lunch when she heard a deafening boom and smelled smoke. She got out of the house, and, in those pre-cell-phone days, made an emergency call next door.
Within minutes of her call, the fire department was on hand. They saved the house, but the damage was still terrible. The entire basement was destroyed — the cable box on top of the TV melted — and the electrical fire fried all the wiring in the house. Worst of all, smoke coated the entire interior, ruining fabrics, darkening family photos and leaving that haunting stink that anyone who has ever been through a fire will recognize. A thin layer of black grime covered everything. By the end of the day the only clothes we owned were the ones we had on, plus a set of fresh underwear we found in the dryer. I’ve been partial to fresh underwear ever since.
In the midst of tragedy, there is comedy. When the firemen arrived, they were concerned that the car parked in our garage should be moved to safety. But as it turned out, my sister had the only set of keys with her, and she was taking final exams as a senior in high school. So mom called the school, and the vice principal got Beth out of class. Here is exactly what this sensitive professional said: “Beth, everyone is OK, but I need your car keys. Your house is on fire. But don’t worry, and go finish your exam. Good luck.” When I call this “comedy,” I mean in retrospect, of course.
On top of that, the firemen must have been surprised when they broke through the window to my father’s upstairs bathroom and stepped into a bag of unrolled toilet paper. Just a few nights before, my dad had waited until my sister and I fell asleep, and then he “TP’d” our bedrooms. I couldn’t get out of bed without breaking a strand of Charmin. We thought it was hilarious, but mother made him gather up the paper in a bag and use it. He kept it right under the window. I wish I had thought to ask the first responders if that was a fire hazard.Finally, a few weeks later, our church family threw us an old-fashioned house-warming to help replace some of the things we lost. At the last minute, they decided it was best to call it a “house-cooling.”
I am grateful for many things in life. Near the top of the list is the fact that my parents helped us through this crisis with incredibly resilient calm. They set the tone for our response: We were alive, we were family and we were going to roll up our sleeves and salvage what we could. Granted, we had to go out and buy some shirts with sleeves to roll up. But we survived the “Great Fire” with faith, humor and quite a bit of 409. That was the year I was introduced to something Mom called scrubbing. In life as in disaster clean-up, it’s amazing what you can rescue with a little elbow grease. So if I’m needed to pitch in at the College Church, just give me a call. After all, we are family.
