What I Would Grab In a Fire

When I was little I used to lay in bed at night and wrestle with the paranoid possibility that the house could catch fire and I'd have to decide what to save. I'd run through all the possibilities - my Barbies? my favorite clothes? my jewelry? my stuffed animals? Would I wake up my parents before or after I grabbed my stuff? Which neighbor's house would we evacuate to? This seriously would keep me going for hours. I was an insomniac at a very early age (I outgrew it).

These days it is easier to figure out what is important. Of course it is those things that can not be replaced. I have way too much clutter in my house, way too many things I could live without but just like having around. But I know, these days, that if my house caught fire and I had to grab just one thing (besides my child and my dog, of course) it would have to be these letters my father wrote when he served in World War II.

Just about all of them are to his mother - he wrote to her several times a week. For the entire time that he served and was away from home, his daily life is chronicled in these letters. His fears for the future, his romantic dilemmas (my mom was not yet really in the picture), his longing for home, anecdotes from around the air base, what movies he saw and what he ate for dinner. They are all handwritten, of course, in his now familiar rambling script. I can imagine him in his barracks hunched over a desk, or propped in his bunk dutifully writing to his mother. His "voice" comes through loud and clear and when I read them I see my father in a completely different way than I, of course, knew him. He is, for those few moments, young, vulnerable, and impressionable. He was envious, curious, and ambitious. He was human.

Dad has been gone for 20 years now and I know, in case of fire, I know that these can NEVER be replaced. I have been trying for years to figure out a good way to preserve them. Nothing brilliant has ever hit me. So they sit in a shoebox on the top shelf of my closet, easy to get to in case I have to.