Tag: fire

Smoke

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I did today’s prompt from WordPress last year, so I asked Meta AI to give me a prompt… Something unusual. Something people wouldn’t think to ask.

The prompt is “what is your biggest smell memory from childhood, and from where did it come?”

The station wagon was an older model, cream with a red interior. I sat in the backseat watching my grandfather smoke his pipe. I thought it was cool that he could hold his pipe in his mouth and drive with both hands, because even then it seemed like a magic trick.

I was born with so many physical and mental comorbidities that balance has been an issue since I was a baby. I learned to walk very late. I am still not very good at it. So, as a kid, I was envious of people who could balance things, like a station wagon and a pipe. I felt similarly about my mom and dad with their drinks and food when they were driving.

But, the writing prompt is specifically about my biggest smell memory, which is smoke. I am starting with cherry tobacco or Presbyterian blend, and memories of my grandfather. I have to work up to talking about smoke slowly, because I need the comfort of my grandfather’s pipe smoke to talk about my first bout of PTSD.

There are certain things you don’t forget about a house fire, and the biggest is how the smoke smelled. How the air smelled. What the temperature was like on the ground. It is burned into you, mostly because you won’t get it out of your hair and skin until you shower, but you are lucky if it ever comes out of the clothes you wore standing there watching your house burn. I was 11 years old, and home alone.

The first thing I noticed was the smell of the smoke, and it registered quickly that this was not peaceful, tranquil, lazy smoke. This was not sitting the back seat of a cream-colored station wagon with a red interior. The smoke was sweet and I enjoyed it, but I never told anyone that because my grandmother didn’t like it when he smoked in the car.

It was the 80s, children. These were different times. I’m not even sure I was required to wear a seatbelt until I was six or seven with my grandparents, because by then my parents had drilled it into me. Of course it wouldn’t occur to my grandparents to tell me to put on a seatbelt. When their kids were young, I’m not sure their cars even had seatbelts.

So, I did the classic riding in the cargo area in my grandfather’s station wagon, or splaying myself into the crawlspace near the back window in sedans. My favorite thing was someone hitting the brakes, making me fall into the backseat with glee. I have also safely ridden in the back of a pickup truck many times, something I regret and yet don’t. I’m glad to have had the experience- it’s fun as hell. Yet, I can’t think of anything more dangerous. Back then, the research had not been done on just how dangerous it is.

And now I realize that I have come back up in topic, because I tend to dive into and back off of pain.

It was a Thursday, December 20th of 1990. Because it was so close to the holidays, we were having a district-wide dance.

Editor’s Note:

I will take a moment to explain that Methodist churches are known for having conferences, but there are smaller groups of churches called “districts,” which is particularly helpful for small churches because they can band together and pool their resources for things like teen dances, guest preachers, etc.

I’d met this boy, and if it was a different day, I’d remember his name. Names come in and out these days…. Anyway, I was at home getting ready for the dance. My mother put my hair in curlers (yes, she did) and had me put on my panty hose and heels (again, I agreed to this willingly) with a nightgown so that I wouldn’t mess up my dress when she was doing my makeup. I swear to you that when I was 14 I already looked 40, because I was a preacher’s kid and had to look the part. Makeup was a large part of my social masking, and it still is to a certain degree.

I can’t act like everyone else, but at least I can kind of look like them.

But my makeup wasn’t on yet- she had gone shopping with Lindsay. My dad was serving communion to shut-ins. It was five days before Christmas, and the smoke wasn’t friendly.

I had one moment of denial. Just one.

I sat there and kept watching “The Mickey Mouse Club,” “cause Fred and Mowava and the Mouseketeers say we’re gonna rock right here.” I thought, if I don’t get up and open the door to the hallway, then everything will stay fine.

It was not fine.

I finally realized that I needed to drag my ass up and see if anything was wrong. I am not lazy, I was preparing for meltdown and burnout, something I can only recognize in retrospect. It was like in cooking, taking three seconds to analyze a situation before you decide how to apply your attention. I get up the nerve to open the door to the hallway and it was already full of thick, black smoke.

I did what I do in every crisis. I instantly turned into my father and rose above. Someone needed to direct this situation until my parents got home, and it had to be me. There was no other option…. Even though by then I am social masking and overstimulated to the point of meltdown, screaming inside because no one is there to take care of me for the first time and it’s a big damn situation. I did not feel abandoned in the slightest. It was just reality. I’m the one here. They’re not.

All of these calculations happened in less than an instant, that was just my thought process…. Which now I realize is also an adult reaction, which proves to me that preacher’s kids, especially the oldest, grow up fast because they’re indoctrinated to help everyone else and eschew help themselves (why I am the worst parishioner in the entire world. I want to help the church because I have a solid background to be able to do that, and then I get overwhelmed and think, “what the fuck did I just do?” I am not helping. I am working because I play inside ball. I’ve known how things work in the church since I was born. That’s not a side most people get to see close up).

It’s funny what you realize, too, when your house is burning. There’s all these “Scruples” questions about what you would grab. I let it all burn. All of it. Not my fault. I was too terrified to take anything with me, although in retrospect I should have grabbed the clothes from the dryer because I was wearing so little and it was December. And in fact, the clothes in the dryer were the only ones that didn’t smell like smoke because of the cage.

I go next door to Doris Haggard’s (names go in and out- not that one) and said, very politely, I might add, “my house is on fire. Would it be okay with you if I used your phone to call the fire department?”

Are there differences between me at 46 and me at 11? Not as many as you would think.

Anyway, the fire department arrives and my preacher’s kid patois kicks in and I’m asking if they need any help or water or anything.

By this time, I should have been in a shock blanket, but again, social masking and overextended to within an inch of my life, so everyone loves me “exactly like I am.”

When my mother and sister came home, my mother was blind with fear and thought I was dead, when I was literally standing five feet from her. For me, death wasn’t a close call. All I saw was smoke and I got the fuck out.

I have talked about Lindsay’s trauma before, that one of the beams in the attic crashed onto Lindsay’s bed, and she heard a fireman say that if she’d been sleeping there, she would have died. It scrambled her brain in a bad way. Tall people don’t realize the impact of their words on the people they can’t see.

But I haven’t talked much about my own, because what got me through that initial bout of anxiety was taking control.

Just like when my mother died, I fell apart with depression and the smallest things became enormous tasks. I’ve always had ADHD and Autism, but the fire helped my neurodivergent brain along mightily. It makes my reflexes shorter and I’m quicker to anger, and I have a lot of work to do around that. But I don’t give up. I keep searching for the thing that will bring me peace.

Now that it’s been so long, I can at least enjoy cherry tobacco and Presbyterian blend again.

It Has All Melted Away

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?

I am sure that this is not true, but it seems that every item I was attached to in my youth ended up in the nightmare that was my closet after our house fire. We got to go back through the house after it was put out to see if there was anything salvageable, and it was traumatic. I will never forget what it looked like. The doors were open, and my clothes were wet and dirty with plastic all over them…. and at first, the plastic didn’t make sense. Then, I realized that it was the hangers. They were blue. Cornflower curlicues designed my clothes in a way no one would have ever wanted….. because not only were they stuck to the hangers, they were stuck to each other.

Because of the disaster in my closet, I did not notice my PC and printer. It’s good that I didn’t at first, because that would have ended me. In those days, just as now, I used my word processor extensively. I didn’t get a new computer in my room for many years. That’s when I put my journals into a backpack and again, stored them away in my closet……. until an air conditioner leaked all over the backpack and I could no longer read the ink. Given what the journaling was about, I’m glad it’s irretrievable. If I don’t need them, no one else does, either….. and this is solid. There is no Lanagan historical value in it except to say that it was my blog before I could type.

Because even though I did create documents as an elementary school kid, I wasn’t the writer at nine that I was at 13. After my hormones kicked in, I actually needed a place that was all my own. Before then, school assignments took up most of my work…. most often in “Print Shop” rather than WordPerfect.

If you had a computer, Print Shop, and a dot matrix printer, you could own a school in six minutes. Every teacher wanted you to make them a banner, and every kid that came to my house wanted to make their own.

Those memories were the ones that hit the hardest as I realized I couldn’t do those things anymore. “Well,” I thought. “There goes all my extra credit.”

So, if you ask me what item I was incredibly attached to, I can say it was my computer first and foremost…… but in reality, everything I ever loved at that age was important. I am not even sure I am telling the truth about the computer. It may or may not have been my most prized possession….. maybe it was a doll. But if it was, I couldn’t see it under the rubble, and the image of the computer stayed.

That’s because it was melted into my desk.

I Already Have

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

What would you do if you lost all your possessions?

My house, the United Methodist parsonage in Naples, Texas, burned down to the ground on December 20, 1990.

It was a child’s Christmas in wails. Presents were given that year that would have been cool had they not been distorted by smoke or water damage, and I only know that looking back. Alternatively, we got presents that we knew were collected five minutes ago, and knew enough to be grateful because we had an awareness that of course no one has our lists anymore. Lindsay and I were grateful for any normalcy at all. The the first few hours, I internalized absolutely everything because I was the only one home. My parents and sister weren’t there. So, I did what I always did in that situation. I became a very tiny hostess to the fire department….. so sorry I was inconveniencing them. There were church members in my neighborhood that were all flocking to the middle of the street and I just started doing everything through an out of body experience. Too much pain to stay connected. In order to emote where people could understand me, I had to put my feelings away. My trauma reflexes do not all come from emotional abuse as a teen, but those reflexes were built on someone who’d already developed those reflexes independently.

I learn a lot about trauma using myself as a case study, because I’m looking back far enough into the past that I write like I’m someone else’s little girl. It’s a lot easier to parent yourself when you see yourself now as a different person…… because when you do all the work, you realize that you are indeed the same person and uncovering all your trauma allows you to reclaim the childlike parts of yourself that were stolen. I also use myself as a case study because even if I had an MD and a PhD, I would still never be as sure about someone else’s history as I am about my own. Patients lie, and about the stupidest shit because they think doctors are judgmental (they’re not, and you have no idea what you’re doing when you leave something out, capiche?). Doctors are, for the most part, judgmental like our last letter in Myers-Briggs is J, not judgmental like an asshole. A doctor is just as much of a geek as a computer programmer. Don’t hold back the tools that let them “if, then.” My dad was a pastor and my grandmother worked in a blood lab. I’ve been steeped in the languages of ministry and medicine since I was born, so it’s entirely possible for me to lose my shit and be completely fine in the same exact moment.

My computer had melted into my desk. My hangers had melted onto and into my clothes. When it all started, I’d been the only one home in my pajamas, getting ready for a district-wide church dance and even had a date.

I was wearing pantyhose and curlers with a Snoopy nightgown when I rang the doorbell next door. I was in preacher’s kid trauma victim mode, the first time I’d ever experienced trauma in its true sense. My house was burning down in front of my eyes and I was the only one of the four of us who knew it. My mother and sister were shopping. My father was delivering communion to shut-ins. It was all me.

All. Me.

I had just turned 12 three months earlier. My grandfather wouldn’t have known what to do in this situation, it was so unique. Age couldn’t line up to experience here because what happened was rare. The other thing is that I would not have felt as alone today. This was at least 10 years before I had a cell phone (because I’m that old, not “we didn’t buy one”) and every contact programmed into it so I wasn’t dependent on my memory for the numbers. In that kind of situation, you’re glad emergency services only have three numbers to remember.

If I’d had my current cell phone, I could have called my mother and sister at the shops. I could have called my dad while he was visiting the elderly. I could have called my grandparents because they only lived about a half hour away. My cell phone now is not handy to me because it can call out. It’s handy because without it, I wouldn’t know who to call.

(As an aside, aren’t cell phones a miracle? I have been impressed with being able to walk around and talk on the phone anywhere since our mobile was in a black bag.)

I am certain that I assured Doris nothing was wrong, it was no big deal, but I had to call the fire department. And would it be okay if I waited with you? I was doing all those things you do when you’re a preacher’s kid, assuring everyone around me that everything was under control.

So, in short, I learned two lessons. The first is that stuff doesn’t matter. The only thing I lost that were precious to me were photographs, and even those don’t matter anymore because any I have that are precious are also on Facebook or WordPress, so they’re backed up. There is no material thing I could lose that would hurt me, really. What hurt me was the second lesson.

Even when things are fucked six ways to Sunday, the reflex to make everyone else more comfortable is intact.

It’s something you don’t find until you lose everything else. You don’t find it until all the bullshit is stripped away and realize you’re pretending to be fine. The reality break from trauma makes it where you live and reflect. You have a binge-purge relationship with feelings because when they come up, you are too overwhelmed. It’s a continual cycle.

It was a brand new ball game when I realized that an anxious attachment is just an avoidant attachment style in disguise. I’ve just been avoiding me.

Writing Anyway

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t have much time to write today, as I have to be at work at 1700. So, this entry may be a little shorter or longer than usual. It’s hard to say. Sometimes I don’t have time to edit to make it shorter. 😛 I think Mark Twain originally had that idea, but it’s true for me as well. When words just flow from my fingers, since this is a blog and not formal writing, most of the time I just hit “Post” whether I think it’s perfect or not….. tpyos and all.

Today for work I am wearing two birthday presents from my sister. The first is a pair of black Bistro Crocs that have The Swedish Chef on the top. I’ve gotten an enormous amount of compliments on them, as I wore them yesterday as well. The second is a red t-shirt with a skull and “crossbones” (a knife and fork) that says, “GO CRY IN THE WALK-IN.” My old chef from Tapalaya says that it should say, “…and take the mop with you” on the back. Either way, it is perfection. I wish I could wear my “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” baseball cap with it, but unfortunately it is like, five sizes too large and therefore makes my ears stick out like an elf. I need to find a way to display it, because there’s no way I’m giving it to someone else. It is, again, perfection. Kitchen conversation is generally unprintable, and be grateful for that. You don’t know you don’t want to know, but you don’t. Trust me.

In other news, I’ve heard that Hurricane Florence has made landfall, and after having seen the devastation in Houston from Harvey last year, I am praying for all the people of The Carolinas. I wish there was more I could do from here- it is a very helpless feeling. Since my work runs Thursday to Sunday, if I had a car I would be there to help rebuild, but it’s not time yet. The storm isn’t finished, and the waters are still rising.

As for DC, we’re virtually safe from all this, save getting some thunderstorms. Old Town Alexandria was flooded the other day, but that’s about all the “badness” I’ve seen in this area. Mostly just a few broken trees. It’s always devastating when we truly do get a hurricane in this area, because things will happen like Mt. Vernon losing trees that George Washington planted himself…. no word on whether they’re cherry or not. But my relief at not being hit is not tempered in the slightest, because I’m too worried about those who have been.

Thoughts and prayers seem empty without shoe leather, but at the moment, it’s what I can do. I hope that the people who’ve been affected can at least feel the love coming toward them, because it is certainly there for them.

I also don’t own my own house, but if I did, those who are flooded out would be welcome to stay with me. Again, it’s a helpless feeling to want to do more, but to be limited in my ability. My only recourse is to stay busy, because otherwise, I would just spin out with empathy. I don’t compartmentalize well, except at work, where the pace is so fast that I am unable to think of anything else.

The thing that gets me the most is taking money from FEMA and diverting it to ICE just in time for hurricane season. It is stunning to me how little the United States government cares about that particular dumbass attack. Or maybe it wasn’t an egregious oversight, but that they truly don’t care- even more frightening. It’s already obvious how little the government cared about Puerto Rico, but at the same time, I doubt even President Trump knew he was their president, too. He doesn’t have that luxury now. I am not making excuses for the president’s behavior, only pointing out his utter incompetency. Maybe this time, he’ll throw out a few more rolls of paper towels. /eyeroll

That last sentence was very sarcastic, which I am trying to mitigate in my daily life. Sarcasm doesn’t seem to help much in the face of disaster, but sometimes it leaks out of my pores. I’d rather give my love and positive affirmations, but at the same time, when people are suffering it seems trite.

Or perhaps not. Maybe it’s what people really need. I just know that in the grief of my mother dying, trite sayings drove me up the wall. And, as long as people are safe, I know they’re just losing things, but that’s its own kind of grief. I know because I’ve been through a house fire. It taught me not to get attached to anything you could call “stuff.” But especially for people who are losing all their “stuff” for the first time, it’s difficult to let go, particularly photo albums that there’s no time to save, or if you’re able to go back into your house after the waters recede, seeing all your albums ruined with water damage. For instance, all the pictures we were able to save from the house fire either had weird streaks across them or smelled like smoke.

Our grandparents did their best to help recreate them, but I was grateful and devastated, because they were different memories than the ones we’d recorded on our own. Again, though, I am thankful that they tried so hard, particularly since I only have one grandparent left, and a lot of the pictures they gave us had them front and center.

So, my empathy comes from sympathy as well. Not only do I identify with their pain, a lot of it, I have worn on my own skin. I remember what it was like to evacuate from Galveston during Hurricane Alicia in 1983. I remember my house fire in 1990. I remember lots and lots of ruined pictures and journals from an air conditioner that leaked all over my closet in 1995…. a small thing compared to a storm, but water damaged pictures and journals never recover in either case. Some of the journals went as far back as 1990, words lost that were at times poignant… and terrible in the way that all tween and teen journals are.

I would have been a star at a show like Cringe if they’d made it. Pretty sure there’s a recording of some of those shows on Netflix if you’re interested. It’s basically people reading old journal entries and poems in front of a live audience…. insanely funny and touching at the same time.

And now, it’s time for one last cup of coffee since the kitchen is open until midnight on Saturdays, and since it’s open until midnight on Fridays as well, I am still dragging ass. All of this was easier when I was 25. It’s either Aleve, Tylenol, and get on with it…. or… GO CRY IN THE WALK-IN.

Love, Love, Love

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have decided that Michael Curry is now my favorite preacher. No offense to Nadia Bolz-Weber and Thomas Long. You’re close seconds. But Curry’s sermon at the royal wedding was a barnstormer. I hope to God, literally, that everyone was paying attention.

…[Pierre Teilhard] de Chardin said fire was one of the greatest discoveries in all of human history. And he then went on to say that if humanity ever harnesses the energy of fire again, if humanity ever captures the energy of love, it will be the second time in history that we have discovered fire.

If only we could take the power of transforming love and apply it to ourselves right now, the world would be a different place. Love envelopes a grace and mercy not available anywhere else. It contains forgiveness that passes all understanding. It is the energy that drives compassion. If we could take the rose-colored glasses of love and apply them to every relationship, romantic and platonic, it would indeed set the world on fire.

It begs the question, if love is that powerful, why don’t we use it?

The simplest answer is that in all of our fallible “humanness,” we get stuck. It’s easy to love the people that love you, especially the ones that believe in your dreams and try to help you reach them. It’s so much harder to love people who have treated you badly, have stomped on your feelings, and though they may have done nothing wrong, the people you don’t know. We tend to be conservative with love when it comes to those people, even though people who have acted badly and the stranger need love the most.

For people who have behaved badly, it is the much needed peace of feeling secure in the fact that their sins against you aren’t held against them. No one should be trapped in the worst moments of their lives, unable to move forward. It is soul-crushing to lose important relationships because you were in an emotional place that carried no light, and aren’t anymore… but people still treat you as if the darkness is your only narrative. What would it be like to live in a world where we automatically assume that eventually, one’s internal candle will once again burn? What if we knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that people recover more quickly when they see that they haven’t lost love while their flames were deprived of oxygen?

For strangers, it is the extravagant welcome that makes them strangers no more. There is a reason that the parable of The Good Samaritan is incredibly powerful. We recognize how badly the people who just walked by look to us, but often we are unwilling to apply the parable’s lesson, because we are frightened. It is hard to overcome fear of the unknown, especially when society perpetuates it by demonizing strangers so that the extravagant welcome they deserve is lost. What would the world look like if no one merely walked by? What would happen with recognition that we are all citizens of the world, not just the community in which we live?

Both philia and agape are the tools we need the most right now. Philia is defined as “brotherly love,” and agape is defined as “the highest form of love and charity, loving one’s neighbor as they love themselves.” We are often capable of philia, because loving each other is so much easier than loving ourselves. Relationships with others become a reflection of how we see ourselves, and if we look in the mirror and see ugliness, that is how we move in the world. We may not treat everyone that way, but often those closest to us. It is easier for us all to treat people we don’t know well with kindness, because we haven’t let them into our inner circle. They don’t know us well enough to know our flaws and failures. It takes loving ourselves to be capable of both kinds of love, the higher power for which we reach, but often fall short in the process.

We can’t help it, because again, we are human. It takes reaching into the divine to see perfection…. and it doesn’t matter what you call divinity. For some people, it is the love of God. For others, it is the power of secular humanism. It is a spectrum that encourages divine love no matter what, because whether you believe there’s a God, or that we are all connected to each other through human bonds, that is the power of the universe. All we need to do is tap in.

If we are capable of finding fire a second time, this is the form it will take. We will have a collective recognition of chords run between us whether we are partners, friends, or neighbors across the world. Each of the candles that burn inside us will set the world ablaze……………….

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces