"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."
— Joan Didion
I am a collector, a curator, and an obsessive hoarder of
nostalgia. I keep ticket stubs and playbills, birthday cards and love notes,
each a memento of a favourite night. A new adventure. A wrong turn. Something
lived.
Just as the landscape of a city can change in an instant, the things we have collected can disappear. The
photos of gap-toothed ancestors and the pages of books can be licked by flames,
and just like that, they’re gone. Yet, ultimately, they don’t matter.
On Thursday night, as the Pasadena burned only metres away,
some of my neighbours panicked. “Grab the things that are most important to
you,” someone said. So, I put Ben, my domestic medium-hair, into his crate, and
we waited for a possible evacuation that never came. The fire grew, but there
was nothing I felt compelled to gather.
I should have thought of my great-grandfather’s pocket watch
or my grandfather’s cuckoo clock. I should have grabbed my passport and the
memory cards that hold thousands of photos. But I had Ben, and that’s all that
seemed to matter.
Days later, from my parking lot, I can look into the broken windows of
the Pasadena. From certain angles, there are patches of sky where the roof
should be. There are charred bikes, beer bottles, melted
blinds, and drapes that are surprisingly intact, each a reminder, that just four days ago, the people who lived in the Pasadena were eating meals, watching television, and then everything changed.
Fundraisers are being planned for the residents of the
Pasadena. The Corktown Pub and Pheasant Plucker are both accepting monetary
donations. There will be a fundraiser at Doors Pub on March 7. A large
fundraiser is being planned for the spring. I’ll post details as they arise.
Too bad they lost the building. Sometimes even an aggressive interior attack can't save a building when the fire's already thorough the roof like shown on you earlier post.
ReplyDeleteWhat's worse is for all those living there loosing everything. Some things can be replaced. Some things cannot. Best thing is when no life is lost.
Glad you and yours are safe
The facade looks remarkably sound. Salvageable?
ReplyDeleteI thought I could smell fire from my yard that night, but it wasn't until the morning that I knew exactly what had happened. It's so awful. Thank you for sharing those fundraisers.
ReplyDeleteThe lost of photos can sometimes have the most lasting effect. The evidence of relatives and friends disappears. Suddenly their existence moves from visual facts to oral history. Your children and grandchildren lose that visual connection to the past and become dependent on the select stories you chose to pass down to the next generation. It is like looking down a path covered in fog, everything is clear until a certain point then it all vanishes.
ReplyDelete