Notes From A Burning House

Never could understand why I like foggy days.  Perhaps I was born to walk the harbors of Rumstick Point or Jamestown in the early morning, because as a New Englander I don’t feel like I have properly woken up without a good chill and a taste of salt on my lips.  I picture myself with a Shavian beard, fixing Johnnie Cakes with leathery hands listening to the clanging sounds of the pier.  (This is especially quaint if you know that I don’t sail and cannot swim.)

Instead, I am clean-shaven and dressed like I have a high-paying job, which I don’t; and I woke up in a lovely house in Mt. Washington that does not, in fact, belong to me.  (I am house-sitting.)  Last night I was up quite late, unable to sleep because of sounds that were nothing like a harbor: police cars, ordering people off the premises of the nearby school through loudspeakers, and more strangely, some kind of animal that was walking on the roof.

Debbie’s animal problems came to a head a couple of weeks ago, when she heard a mewing sound that sounded so insistent and vulnerable she had to put down her New Yorker and respond to the call.  She went out back and then she went out front and what she noticed was that the mewing sound got *softer* when she went outside.  Hours later, animal rescuers had cut a hole into a wall inside her house (which she has occupied for all of six months) and liberated a lone kitten.

The kitten and Debbie’s dog are not under my care, so the house is empty and quiet - just me and Debbie’s book collection, which I love exploring.  Last night I distracted myself by flipping through a medical textbook for surgeons.  Pure therapeutic schadenfreude, with a touch of moralism, nothing to be proud of, I merely report: "I may be neurotic, I may feel like a loser and fake, I may feel guilt-ridden and inadequate, behind in my bills and utterly panicked about money, but I don’t have *that* in my pancreas and for this I should be grateful.  Other people know suffering - what I am suffering now is mere inconvenience."

Then I put the book away and pulled the chain over Debbie’s bed to turn the light off, and I sat there listening to the possum or grizzly bear or jihadi terrorist (or, worse, an angry mama cat) prowling the roof of the house.

If it had been sunny and hot this morning, that might have been more than I could bear.  Thank heaven for fog.

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