The song “Burning Down The House” by The Talking Heads has always been one of my favorites, but I fear it will never be so again. On Christmas morning, around 4:30 a.m., Veek and I awoke to the blaring of our home smoke detectors, followed shortly thereafter by our son Emmett beating on our door and yelling “The house is on fire!”
We quickly stumbled out of bed and put on sweatpants and sweatshirts (it was in the 20′s that evening), and rushed to our living room, to find it thick with white smoke. A quick attempt to open windows and doors to let the smoke out proved futile, and I yelled for everyone to get out of the house and to the front yard. We all ran out, and my daughter dialed 911 to tell them we had a fire.
Within seconds we realized that while our 9 year old dog Scout was with us, our 9 month old puppy Fenway was still in her crate sitting in my office inside. Since the smoke had been white and thick, but no flames had been seen, I ran back into the house to get Fenway. When I got to the office, I found it quickly filling with choking black smoke, coming down from the ceiling to about my waist. I bent down to try and avoid its toxic fumes, and reached the kennel quickly. What I saw to my right scared the hell out of me – our family room, separating me and Fenway with glass French doors and only 3 feet away, was completely in flames, from floor to ceiling. I grabbed her kennel and dragged it out of the house and to the front yard with the family.
Within five minutes of that there were flames shooting through our front door. Had we not awoken when we did, had Emmett not rushed around banging on the door when he did, I’m quite sure we would not have made it out. At the very least, we could not have come out the front doors, thereby dooming Fenway to death and probably injuring some of us jumping out a bedroom window about 8 feet above the ground.
We all stood there, dazed and in shock, watching our home burn. The Austin Fire Department arrived quickly and started to battle the blaze, but as we were told later it was too hot to safely go inside. Once they had determined that everyone was out, they could not risk the lives of their firefighters to go in until it was safe enough to do so.
As the wailing of the sirens awoke the neighbors, they began to pour out and take care of us. We were escorted into the home of our across-the-street neighbors George and Barbara, who immediately began to help us calm down, get warm and reassure us that the items of greatest value, the people and dogs, are safe. Other neighbors came by to bring blankets, clothes, emergency money, and offers of beds to sleep in.
Soon thereafter friends started arriving. This was still while the fire fighters were working to get all the flames and hotspots out. Each half hour brought more people offering help, support and sympathy. The emergency medical personnel insisted on checking us all out, and I initiated contact with our insurance agency on the advice of several friends.
About 3 hours after they had arrived, the incident commander from the AFD came and told me that he could take me inside the house now. He advised me that I should go alone first, and that would help me prepare Veek for when she saw it. I have to say, when I first approached what had been our front doors, my knees buckled. It was a scene from Dresden, everything in sight was burned to the point where it was unrecognizable. Whole walls were gone – I could see all the way through my house past our backyard to our neighbor’s house. Every stick of furniture was either completely gone or charred.
I went in with the Lieutenant and walked around a bit, shocked and dazed. Shortly someone came up and told me that Veek was outside and insisting on coming in, so I went back out to try and prepare her. Its not like I was so much under control myself, but I knew how chilling it was to see our home destroyed and that she would be crushed. I went up to her, held her tight and looked her right in the eyes and all I could think to say was “It’s all gone. You have to realize that when you go in, nothing is left.” I now realize how poorly I had prepared her, but I also know that I wasn’t exactly out of shock myself.
Veek walked up to the front doors and broke into tears immediately, heavy sobs of realization of not only how close we came to death, but what was lost forever. We had built up a lot of memories in that home – raised our kids from small infants to teenagers, decorated it with art and photographs from our trips around the world, dragged several heavy yet sentimental pieces of furniture from our families into it, etc. Now it was all gone. I held her while we walked through the rooms and viewed the devastation. Basically, our living room, kitchen, office and family rooms were completely obliterated, reduced to ash. Here and there you could see the remains of something, but you knew that it was beyond repair. My grandfather’s rolltop desk sat on the left of the living room, blackened and burnt.
We tried to grab some of the more precious things which had “only” been damaged by the smoke – you may be amazed at how smoke can get into drawers, boxes, bags, etc. But we grabbed Veek’s jewelry, my wedding ring, my passport, and few other trifles and left the house to return to our neighbor’s. The Fire Department called a “board up” company to come and in essence seal up the home from intruders, and thus began the post-fire portion of our lives.
Friends and neighbors had been stopping by to lend comfort all day long, including bags of clothes, cell phones, toiletries, etc. Since we had run out of the house just in time, we had nothing but the clothes on our backs. As we sat in the house of our next door neighbors, Mo and Ron (who were in Philadelphia at the time but had been told of the fire and immediately offered their home as temporary shelter for us), the living room quickly filled up with bags and suitcases and cardboard boxes. Veek and I broke down repeatedly as loved ones came to see us, people with whom we’ve shared our lives and who understood the devastation which had just occurred.
Later that evening, for the first time all day since waking up to the noise of the smoke detectors, we were all alone at our next door neighbor’s house. The four of us sat around and held a virtual Christmas – saying what we had bought for each other, what was in our stockings, what I was going to cook for Christmas dinner. While this may sound sad, it was actually kind of uplifting for us, driving home deeply the point that all that stuff was just that – stuff – and we were all there to sit around and talk.
Shortly thereafter, some friends came to pick us up and take to their home, where about 10 families had packed up their individual Christmas dinners and created a communal dinner. People were obviously trying to make sure we were not alone, that we were surrounded by loved ones, and each of us had people important in our lives standing there with us. After dinner, we went back to Mo and Ron’s house, where we spent the first two days after the fire, and tried to wind down. Yet even then, just hours after the event, the outpouring of love and support had continued unabated, and there were even more boxes and bags of donated clothes awaiting at the house when we arrived.
Sometime that same night, Christmas night mind you, some folks came over with wrapped presents for our kids. These were people we did not know, but they wanted to make sure the kids had a Christmas. As my 16 year old son opened up a package labelled “Teenage Boy”, his eyes grew to plates as he saw a brand new Wii game system. Folks, you can’t go out and buy a Wii on Christmas day, these folks had taken a gift from their own family and brought to our son to make sure his day brightened.
Stories such as this continued, seemingly hour by hour, for days. Veek and I would break down repeatedly as waves of people from our lives appeared offering clothes, places to stay, money and most of all, love and support. It was as if a pebble had been tossed into a still lake – concentric circles of people contacted us to do what they could. As word got out, not only neighbors but friends from all over joined in. Yelpers, members of an online community here in Austin to which Veek and I belong, began to discuss and mobilize.
Our dear, dear friend Steve Basile, away in New York for his annual Christmas visit to family, began to fire electronic signals to every internet community which mattered – Yelp, ex-Convex (Veek’s company from our days in north Texas), ex-Tivoli (the company both Veek and I worked for in Austin), Facebook, LinkedIn – generating countless responses. People we hadn’t seen nor spoken to for up to 10 years began to reach out. Families we know who have significant challenges of their own came to offer whatever they could. Friends of our kids came to make sure they were ok, which helped Veek and I just try to hold to our own emotions.
One consistent, and sad, element of this event is the waves of realization of what was lost. Veek or I would be sitting there and suddenly remember something precious which was now gone – not precious in monetary value, but precious only to us. The pictures the kids had drawn which were framed on the entry wall were now history – hell, the whole wall was history. I had probably 30,000 high resolution photographs taken over the years, archived safely (I thought) to external hard drives in my office. Now my office was just a pile of charred rubble. My cameras, lenses, lights, everything – gone. We knew that it was just “stuff” as people kept telling us, but each as hour of time passed, the shock of almost dying lessened and the sense of just pure sadness increased.
We spend two days at Mo and Ron’s house, but they were returning from their holiday trip, so we headed to our next temporary destination. Jim and MaryBeth Welch live in a beautiful home nearby, much nicer than what we were used to, and they were out of town for the week, and offered to let us stay there. So the smokey vagabonds moved our now meager possessions to the Welch’s. It was in their lovely home that Veek had maybe our first smile of the past three days – thinking about how we had just lost our home, our cars were heavily damaged, we had no clothes or shoes – but we were staying in a beautiful large home and driving our friend Mo’s Jaguar. We were the most well-appointed homeless people ever!
Really, the first few days were just all about getting over the shock. Close friends such as the Fuellings, Browns, Dielmann’s and then Mo & Ron and others, would consistently stop by to ensure we were ok. We gave the kids some money to go to the mall with their friends to buy some clothes, and on Saturday Veek and I went ourselves. We were a sorry sight – wandering around Macy’s thinking that everyone was staring at us. We bought some basic items to tide us over – jeans, a pair of sneakers – bur really, our spirits weren’t in it and we quickly exhausted.
In fact, neither of us slept much the first week or so. At first I think we all were kind of afraid of going to sleep because of the circumstances of the fire itself – being awoken at 4:30 a.m. by smoke detectors will give you a lasting memory, trust me.
Life doesn’t stop for the weary, though, and we needed to secure more long term accommodations. Luckily enough, in a neighborhood with very few rentable homes, one was available directly across the street from our home. Our insurance adjusters worked with the landlord and quickly got an agreement in place, and we spent the next few days moving out of Mo and Ron’s and into the rent home. Thus began the next wave of support.
Largely driven by Basile, people started to bring things to the empty rent house to allow us to live again. Beds, couches, chairs, tables, pots, pans, linens, forks, knives, hangars, and everything you can image. We were amazed that barely three days after renting the temporary housing, it was bursting with furniture and had boxes and boxes everywhere filled to the brim with things for us to use. Again, Veek and I would just sit down every now and then and try to hold it together – why were we the recipients of such generosity when there are so many people in need? It was crazy.
For the next week or so, we had a fairly constant stream of people coming by from all walks of our lives, bringing more things to help make the new house a home. Televisions, tables, cookware, and more. It was a tremendous challenge just to manage all of this, but luckily enough we had Basile as point person, and he took effective and efficient control.
By the end of school vacation, we had attained a certain level of normalcy – as much as you can when you’ve lost everything you relied upon. There are too many examples to list out, but trust me, losing all your tax records, your partially filled out college financial aid applications, your work badges, your work computers, your home computers, your account passwords, your stack of outstanding bills, etc. can put kind of a crimp in your life.
We returned to school and work and began figuring out what life was going to be like for the next year or so. Work/school all day, then come home to a list of things needing addressing – changing the mail, electricity, internet service. Starting over on the financial aid applications. Contacting companies to ask for new bills, contacting the county and school district to get copies of our tax bills to use for filing our income taxes. It’s crazy and can be overwhelming if you aren’t careful.
One thing which we had initially resisted but has turned into a godsend is a Care Calendar. Our dear friend Lynne Rhea insisted on setting up a Care Calendar for us, and four days a week some kind souls appear at our door at 6 p.m. to bring us dinner. The food has been not only delicious, it’s freed us up to concentrate on other matters than making and cleaning up a dinner. Veek and I now joke about how hard its going to be to go back to actually cooking and cleaning up once the Care Calendar runs out in February!
Steve Basile has been a rock, and continues to be one. Daily check in calls and notes. Managing donations, both financial (to bridge the unfortunate insurance gap which has been identified) and otherwise. We wonder how he has the energy, but he’s determined to “kick this fire’s ass” and shows it every day.
Yelpers continue to amaze – from KK to Kurt to Jens and beyond. Again Veek and I wonder why we have engendered such support from these kind people, but at the same time we’ve come to rely upon them. KK’s visits with us consistently life our spirits, force us to see beyond the burned out shell of our old home and envision a new life. It’s indescribably uplifting.
Well this post has gotten quite long. I’ll end it now, but with this very important statement:
There have been just too many people who have reached out to help, I can’t possibly mention every one of them. But I don’t want anyone reading this to feel slighted in any way. The Swoffords, the Hutchesons, all the folks from Planview and Motive and Convex, the Hesses, the Monkee-Boys – there are just so many people that I’m worried someone will feel as if we did not appreciate their support and kindness. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We’ve saved as many of the cards and notes as we could, and emails too. I’m trying to find time to respond to each to let the folks know that we appreciate their concern, their support and their love. We’ll continue to need it as the weeks and months progress and the shock of the fire lessens.
Just know that our family – Aly, Emmett, Veek and I – are just so appreciative and blessed to have you in our lives, and it is your support that has allowed us to have any thoughts of renewal and anticipation of a wonderful future after this devastating event.
Thank you one and all.
Let’s begin with Baze. A more kind, generous and passionate person you will not find. Putting aside the obvious impact he has had on our family in the wake of the devastation of 12/25/09, Baze is a great guy with whom I share an interest in beer and music. Last month we drove 210 miles each way to go see Thievery Corporation and Massive Attack in Dallas – on a worknight! We met when I walked up to him at an old Tivoli beer bash. I had tickets to go see REM (opening acts were Radiohead and Natalie Merchant – a killer lineup), and my planned companion bailed on me at the last minute. I saw Baze standing there in a Grateful Dead t shirt, and figured we’d get along, so I asked him if he wanted to go with me. That began over a decade of going to see live music together, including several great shows by Patti Smith.
Mark, someone with whom I’ve spent countless hours golfing and sharing beers and laughs, has so many character flaws that I would end up writing an entire book instead of a long blog post. But Mark’s character flaws have nothing to do with sports. His preferred NFL team is the Raiders, a long-suffering franchise which almost demands that its fans be low key unless living in the heart of Oakland. The fact that Mark hasn’t once mentioned the “tuck rule” to me shows his grace.
Her use of modern references to help relate the reader to 17th century colonial America is exceptionally well done. Where else would you see a thoughtful discourse on these subjects which incorporates not only detailed examination of the language used by those living at the time (John Winthrop, John Cotton and more) with the 1960′s-era television sitcoms “Bewitched” and “The Brady Bunch”?
Facebook is changing all that. By encouraging people to post their every thought, and making it so easy to do, I am finding that people whom I like and respect are lessened in my eyes. The funny thing is that Facebook hasn’t changed the way they think, it’s just shown a light on those thoughts, and propagated them for all to see, for eternity.
