“What are you thinking about?” asked my daughter Leila while I sat next to her and my Mom at a Mariners game last weekend. “I was thinking about this morning, I spent almost an hour trying to think about what to write and I couldn’t get going.”

She looked at me and confidently said, “Why don’t you write about being here, at this ballgame?” So that’s where this started, and then things went in a different direction.

Back to more food and garden next week: I have a piece on school lunches, one on pie, and another on native plants in the works. Have a wonderful and hopefully clear-skied weekend.

Fires destroys, but also makes for beautiful sunsets.

Fires Near and Far Away

For Nashika. Written on 9/11.

I sipped peppermint tea while I gazed out on the horizon above the highest bleachers. The Space Needle was a dark gray silhouette surrounded by a thick peachy-brown haze blown in from evergreen forests burning along the Cascades. At the top of the 7th inning, the stadium went dark. After a few moments, a fire alarm sound started, and the large screens had alarm bells. Loud music, animated flames and the phrase “Los Bomberos” (the firemen) greeted the relieving pitcher Andrés Muñoz onto the field. He was coming to put the fires out.

……………….

Sabrina walked into the sunlight-filled room for Model UN class, her arms filled with binders and loud “Hey!!” to punctuate her entrance into the room. She was tall, with a long torso and strong legs. The most powerful part of her countenance was not her body but her face; eyes full of the future and large lips that accentuated every word.

Gabrielle was in the class too. I was in Honors English with her as well as this elective, and I usually sat with her and Sabrina as the others (mostly guys a grade above me) grouped together. Gabrielle was from the Carribbean, always friendly to me. I made her laugh the time she asked me to try and talk like her. “Come on, just relax your tongue” was the only advice she gave me. She was almost in hysterics when I tried. Gabrielle was elegant. How can a 16-year-old be elegant? Delicate gold hoops in her ears, a corner-of-the-mouth smile; she was never in a rush. Her boyfriend waited for her by a row of lockers.

We were preparing for Model UN, the gathering of high school students from all over the region to meet and stay two nights in Manhattan. The trip was the main reason many in the class had signed up. We worked in the Carl Sagan wing, named for the scientist that went to our high school but that famous scientist never mentioned it. I don’t think most of the kids knew about Carl Sagan.

We took the trip to NYC in the spring, through the Holland Tunnel and arrived in midtown. There was talking, and papers, more talking and sessions dealing with security councils and the world health organization. All these kids from other towns took everything so seriously. We were going to save the world one boring point-of-order after another.

After the dance, I went to Sabrina and Gabrielle’s room. We settled down to watch Showtime at the Apollo. Those two girls transformed Steve Harvey’s showcase into something I’d casually come across at home into something filled with clapping and yelling at the screen and loud laughter.

One afternoon weeks after the school trip, I was walking down the hallway by myself. Gabrielle came from the opposite direction and ran towards me. She started crying, and the words rushed out of her mouth…

“Sabrina…. Fire….”, a hand went up to her face.

“She was in the closet with her sister to get away from the smoke…”

“She died….” and she came over to hug me.

I stood there, silent.

I couldn’t talk.

I didn’t react.

“I can’t believe it.”

It was the first time someone I knew died. Someone young, like me.

I didn’t really believe it.

I asked Gabrielle about something related to school.

Gabrielle looked at me.

“What’s WRONG with you?”

I shut up.

“Someone just dies and you change the subject. I can’t BELIEVE you.”

I stood in the hallway as Gabrielle walked away, pissed off.

……………….

At the ballgame, the lights went back up. Muñoz got on the pitcher’s mound. The sirens and wails stopped.

Silence, pitch, strike, cheers.

I turned to my Mom. “I’m on the second day of trying out Ginko Biloba for memory, for anxiety. It’s a little green herbal supplement.”

Clapping, pitch, strike, louder cheers.

“The anxiety”, Mom said, “is a symptom of getting older. Many people have it.”

People stand, they scream, they cheer. Strikeout.

…………………

Carl Sagan once said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

The universe, born out of explosions and fire. Billions of years of fire, volcanoes, water churning and giving birth to life that evolved into apples, grasses with seeds ground into flour, grasses chewed by cows to make milk for butter, grasses that morphed into sugarcane.

Everyone knew that kids at school went into the bathroom to smoke. They got away with it because what were the teachers going to do, stand in the bathroom all day? I asked Dave—he always smelled like smoke—for a lighter. He smiled and said sure, and I took it with me.

Gabrielle sat with me in the courtyard of the high school. It was normally closed off for everything but school concerts, but we asked if we could sit there and chat and the teachers allowed us for a lunch period. A tree was planted for Sabrina, her death whispered about more than shouted.

I took the lighter out, and took out some paper. I thought maybe we would write words and burn them, messages to turn into smoke and float up and away or maybe get breathed in by us. But we sat there, two teenagers that weren’t quite friends but closer because of our shared experience. We couldn’t write. Staring at the slips of paper no words came, no words to explain the confusing deep twist in our core that life wasn’t fair.

the Punk Lady Apple

Fires Near and Far Away