Cookie Monster Survives the Fire

Because I am recovering from cataract surgery, I couldn’t accompany my daughter, who drove with my friend and Palisades homeowner from the townhouse where I now live - to the house I lived in for a year, which still stands in Pacific Palisades, having survived the fire.

I realize how lucky I am and have been. That after selling my townhouse in Santa Monica and renting this house with a breathtaking terrace view of the ocean and foothills and lurid rose gold sunsets – I’d felt too isolated there. The house is in Castellammare, an enclave just above Palisades Village. It is beautiful but windy and very dark at night with no streetlamps or traffic and I felt a sense of foreboding from the time I moved in. So much so that I signed a lease on (another) townhouse in Santa Monica after my one-year rental was nearly up in December. This was lucky, considering what has happened, yes.

My landlady there was friendly and so were my neighbors – in fact, it was my neighbor across the street, now a friend, who phoned me the morning of January 7^th, as I dropped off my little dog Flossie with her dogsitter in Venice.

“I think you’d better come back up here” she said. Her voice sounded strange. She told me that there was fire starting and that an evacuation order was imminent. Planes had been dropping water, she said – the neighborhood had begun to burn. I started to laugh, then stopped – because she seemed to be making no sense, though I knew her to be a remarkably sensible person, a scientist, a professor.

Still, though I heeded her warning, I did not hurry to drive back up Pacific Coast Highway to the Porto Marina exit. Instead I bought a strawberry/banana smoothie and wandered distractedly to my car.

But what I saw when I turned onto Monte Grigio Drive after the twisty turn-y drive up the mountain woke me up in a way that I’ve never been wakened before. At 10 A.M. on January 7^th, my street was on fire, houses at the end of the block engulfed in flames. The sky was black, the winds felt, and were, a hundred miles an hour. My neighbor had already evacuated, and I saw clearly what she’d tried to warn me about – the Pacific Palisades fire had started there in Castellammare that morning – we were the beginning of the end.

On The New Yorker Radio Hour yesterday, I listened to my friend and New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear, whose house in Palisades village burned to the ground, as she described finding the stone of her engagement ring in the rubble and ash - among the nails and plaster all that was left of her family home. I felt what she felt - that there was this one remaining thing that the mind could attach to and hold close – one thing saved, one treasure rescued from the shock of dispossession.

My friends, some of whom are fellow Angelenos, react to this horror in one of two ways. Some identify closely and express sorrow and provide food and clothing and ready help. Others seemingly long to dismiss what has happened – offer “life goes on” type bromides, similar to those offered after a death. In their defense, it is indeed hard to imagine losing everything, losing your life as you knew it. Because your life doesn’t go on – not in the same way.

It’s true that Angelenos of all income brackets are now displaced and homeless – perhaps the shock and tragedy of homelessness itself has become an abstraction and those who don’t seem empathetic represent an even greater hopelessness, looking like indifference.

But I was grateful for the solid things, the objects, the coat and blouses and leggings, coffee makers, deodorant and tissues, the signs of practical love for one who has, temporarily, as far as possessions go, next to nothing. But again, I am lucky, I have a place to live and the same good friends have donated furniture.

But I avoid hearing about what now are distractions – poetry events or an LATimes account of “survivor’s guilt” from those never required to evacuate, thus remaining untouched by fire.

My daughter (who’d flown down from Oregon) and the owner of the house searched through the unlit interior of the Palisades place – and found most of what I’d listed for them to bring back – random items, including a Cookie Monster cookie jar. FEMA provided Hazmat suits to protect them from breathing the ash heavy in the air – and further protection as they touched the smoky furniture and bedding and clothing in the closet.

They accomplished what Dana had on her deeper investigation of devastation – (her house and everything in it burning to the ground) – she recorded her mind thinking through the unthinkable. The mind hovering, sorting through the burnt objects, searching for signs of – we were here, we had lives.

Because that’s all we are, finally, pieces of rebar and plaster, the Cookie Monster jar. Perhaps a box of archival papers and poems never found. Does it matter?

In a photograph my daughter took, one could see how the fire came right up to the front entrance – then stopped - leaving creosote blackness like dark blood seeping under the door. Why did it stop there?

I put on the soft velour coat my daughter brought me from a closet. It smells of smoke, wearing it is like wrapping myself in the fire’s breath.

I thought later about how I failed to ask my daughter to bring my poetry books, my manuscripts or family photos: memories, now painful, of an unrecoverable past. I wanted only one thing – the cookie jar – from a time when Annie was small, her father was on Broadway in “M. Butterfly” and fans of his, the human cast of Sesame Street, invited us to visit the shooting set. She met Big Bird and sat inside Oscar the Grouch’s garbage can. I remember this because David was alive then and brilliant in the play and Annie was a delighted child. We hung out on Sesame Street and then went ice skating at Rockefeller Center followed by hot chocolate at the café. It was snowing in NYC, the snow fell all that day and the next and covered the great city in white. The cookie jar belongs not to me but to that lost time and it is all the sentimental memory I can stand right now.

And yes, my friends have given me cookies too. Everything has changed, as Yeats says, changed utterly. But cookies still fit into Cookie Monster, who is always hungry.