Still fuming
This morning I came downstairs to a note from my wife taped over the stove. The top line read, “Alert * Alert * Alert.” In our 25 years together, she has left me many notes, but this was the first that began, “Alert * Alert * Alert.”
The rest of her note said to please stay inside all day with the kids and run the air conditioning because the air quality was so bad that the hospital where she is a respiratory therapist had been jammed the night before with people suffering respiratory distress. So we stayed in the house all day with the air conditioning running except for one 15-minute walkabout in the late afternoon without which my energetic and sometimes crazy dog was guaranteed to bust a dog-shaped hole through the wall in her lust to be outside. The air outside was the color and consistency and taste of some very wan barley soup. While my boy and I couldn’t make out any fires on the ridgeline in the distance, we could see large clouds stuffed with the brown offshoot of flames beyond the crest. We went to the park briefly, where the dog chased around at nothing and I hung upside down from a chinup bar to stretch out my spine, then we headed back in.
It was unusual to be inside the house all day. I remember during college and grad school and for some time afterward, I could stay inside all day either writing or playing games with friends or watching movies, but now I don’t think I’m fit for it. I ended the day with a newfound understanding of how the dog must feel: wondering when will that door to outside open again? Somehow or other I filled the day, reading every editorial inch of the Los Angeles Times (except Sports, which doesn’t count), and reading The New Yorker, and doing a massive online Sudoku puzzle, and lending advice and counsel to my 7-year-old who was engaged in a neverending war against the reviled Queen Elizabeth in Civilization 4 because she wouldn’t trade him the resources what he wanted, and prepping for a dinner I was going to cook for my friend and my kids, and cleaning up the kitchen, and having an almost two-and-a-half-hour meeting with a playwright who came by to discuss her new play that I’m directing. But finally at 7:30, with dinner finished and the plates cleared and my son and daughter arguing over who was going to perform which relevant duty in cleaning up the kitchen, my dinner guest and I retired to the back yard for cigars and drinks. It seemed somehow thoughtless and simultaneously apt to sit outside in the ashen air and smoke cigars.
Now my friend has left and my children are asleep and I’m writing this. I’ve poured salts into a hot bath I’m running. Soon I’ll be soaking away the muscle fatigue of sitting around inside pretty much all day, and then I’ll go to sleep, hoping to wake up and learn that these fires encircling the valley are out, and that my many friends who live in those hills, as well as their homes, are safe.