Unmoored: A Meditation
Weeks have passed since the evening explosion in a neighbor’s attached garage, the fire that followed consuming the bulk of their house before the volunteer firemen’s hoses were even unspooled. The following morning, the damage, less than one hundred yards away, was visible from one upstairs window. The garage was leveled, half the house a shell. On the news, the cause of the explosion was limited to speculation. The owners, unmoored by catastrophe, seemed stupefied, chorusing, “Just like that, everything gone.”
Sometimes, I manage weeks without thinking that where and what I am is precarious and temporary. Before I feel as if I need to shelter in some other place. As if I’ve read a detailed forecast for long-term ruinous rain, the place I live located where the highway in and out of danger floods so often that river sediment seems to be its surface. Where, falling asleep during downpours is like leaving active flames in the fireplace the way my father did, trusting the gleaming, decorative grate.
Nearly fifty years ago, when I was an English teacher in a New York high school, there was a story my weakest class of students loved. A father and son travel by boat to an island exposed by low tide. The small skiff, secured improperly by the boy, drifts away. Nothing can save them, yet those students, all of them seniors, never blamed the boy for his fatal error. What they loved to talk about was how the father lifted the boy to his shoulders and steeled himself as the ocean water rose. The students, seventeen or eighteen and often unhappy about where their lives had arrived, waved their hands to volunteer their own stories about making terrible mistakes.
In that town, years before, a family had made a fortune manufacturing Jello. Within a modest walk from my house were the remains of the factory where that famous powder had been flavored and colored and packed into small boxes whose shapes were as familiar to shoppers as those of eggplants and ears of corn. Some of the students could name the four original flavors — raspberry, lemon, strawberry, orange. One girl surprised everyone by listing the flavors that had failed — celery, mixed vegetables, coffee, chocolate. By the time I was a teacher there, very few of the factory’s many windows remained unbroken by vandals.
None of the boys in that room would admit to liking Jello, but among those students were children and grandchildren of men and women who had once believed in the longevity of their work with sugar, gelatin, and dye. According to those students, all of their older relatives were stunned by the news of the factory’s relocation, assuming what they made was so popular that it would always be boxed and shipped from their neighborhood. They never considered the possibility of the business being sold to a conglomerate. Now, a community-sponsored museum for what the town has lost is housed nearly across the street from that high school, as proximate as my neighborhood’s fire-ruined house.
My father, a widower for more than two decades, remained bewildered that he lived alone. Each time I visited, he seemed to have sunk more deeply into the only living room chair he ever sat in, his eyes sweeping the walls as he murmured, “Who would have thought?” But not once, not in the classroom or with my neighbors or sitting across from my father, have I volunteered that I, more often than not, react to catastrophes by thinking “inevitable,” certain that such selfishness needed to be kept secret.
I’ve visited that small museum devoted to Jello. It includes a mold shaped and sized to produce a Jello brain. An old magazine, folded open, displays a photograph of a green, lime-flavored example to encourage serving a quivering, chopped-vegetable-infused brain as salad. That brain looks alien in a B-movie manner, its owner coming from such improbable distance that that he or she could require anything of us — forced labor, exile, or even death.
Within two days, the house fire’s cause was discovered to be an e-bike battery explosion, disaster produced by something purchased for economy and health. Hearing that news, I thought, for once, “Who would imagine?” Early the following morning, I walked, uneasy, by my neighbors’ yard into a half hour of solitude. When I returned home, the low sun, from a cloudless sky, cast the shadow of the undamaged, next-door house over the scattered debris, accidental as what remained of the impossible.