Reset Forty-Nine, Day One Hundred Sixty-Six

Time seemed to move very slowly during my afternoon/evening nap Tuesday. I would wake up thinking hours had passed, look at the clock on the phone, and see that I'd been sleeping (or cat napping) for only an hour or so. After four such naps I decided it was time to get up and think about fixing some dinner. Dinner turned out okay, like something from the old days when I had a schedule and could still get intermittently organized. It got chilly fast this evening, and since dinner I've mostly been nodding off in front of the computer screen, one of my throws draped over me. I think I Might have done laundry Tuesday afternoon, or morning, or sometime, but I don't have any clear memory of it. My clearest memories are of things I imagined sixty years ago, and even those aren't very clear. I think my brain is trying to tell me in its own stupid way to go back to bed. I'll probably listen to it, but only because I really agree with it.

Anniversary

In the early hours of November 8 five years ago I unintentionally fell asleep on my couch, sharing it with five cats. Three more were in other parts of the room. Three outside had been unfed, as raccoons were hanging around and devouring every bit of food I left out for the cats. I intended to feed them later, once the raccoons quit the neighborhood. They never got fed, and my last sight of the cats in the house, except for one, was before I fell asleep. Sometime after dawn, a neighbor came banging on my door, which scared the house cats into hiding, and told me the field at the end of our block was on fire and likely to soon cut off the only road out, and everybody was leaving.

A furious wind was blowing, and when I went out back to see about feeding the outdoor feral cats they were nowhere to be found, but the smoky air was dusted with swirling embers, and I could hear small explosions coming from the neighborhood to the east. I've written about all this in more detail elsewhere (here), and don't want to go over it again, though I've naturally been thinking about those events today. When I think too much about it my mind automatically recoils into a fantasy world that substitutes for the life I ought to have lived, elsewhere.

That unlived life is all too much and too sad to go into as well, but the memory of my cats sticks in my mind no matter what, especially my last sight of Portia, the bravest of them, who came into the kitchen as I was preparing to leave with my sister and brother-in-law who had managed to get across town to fetch me. Portia gave me a distressed look I'll never be able to forget. I didn't manage to get her or any of the others out, and still don't know if she (or they) perished in the house or managed to escape it and perhaps suffer even greater terrors in the burning and then burned town. I followed the Internet groups who were rescuing stranded surviving cats from the ruins over the next few months, but they never found any of mine, or I never was able to recognize them from the photos that were posted, or was unable to connect with the few that were posted who I thought might be mine.

In the end, uncounted animals and eighty-five people died in that fire, and I'm sure even more have since died from it, and many more will do so in the future. I'm quite sure my aging process was accelerated by that experience, and I'm considerably worse off now than I would have been at this time had it never happened. I also suspect that my nephew who was also caught in the fire, and has since died, was one of those delayed victims. For a while, the burning of Paradise was the second most costly and deadly fire in American history, until this year when that dubious honor was taken by the fire that destroyed Lahaina, Hawaii. That adds another touch of irony to Don Henley and/or Glen Frey's lyrics to "The last Resort": You call some place Paradise, kiss it goodbye.

There may be rebuilding, but these places will never be the same again. Rest in Peace, Paradise. Rest in Peace, cats.

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