Fleeing from Flames ...

What would YOU carry?

Dear Readers:

Last week, I devoted my subscription newsletter "One Good Thing” to a somewhat anguished essay about the fires ripping through Southern California. As I noted, for me Los Angeles has always been “another day in the sun.” It’s “La La Land!”
So colorful! So romantic!

You can read last week’s essay

HERE

My friend, the writer Cari Lynn, could be a stand-in for a lot of people in LA who might still have their homes, but who have spent the last three weeks careening in a mental state somewhere along the spectrum between anxious and terrified. Cari has evacuated twice and has followed commonsense guidelines to have a bag packed, the car gassed up and — facing out toward the street. [Because — think about it — if you are trying to leave your driveway and enter a street packed with other people evacuating, it is much easier to nose your way into traffic than back into traffic.]

Cari and I happened to be on the phone with each other as she was driving home from one multi-day evacuation and reentering her house. As she walked into her home, she seemed surprised that everything was … still there.

When you’re living day after day in a heightened state, it’s hard to imagine normalcy.

For many people, the act of packing, fleeing, and living in a world marked by loss — or the fear of it — brings forth the generational trauma of diaspora.

For Cari — these anxious days of window-rattling winds, smoke-filled skies, and the desire (or need) to leave reminds her of what previous generations of her family faced when forced to leave their homes in Eastern Europe.

She has written the essay below, and has given me permission to publish it.

The Things They Carried — or Didn’t

by Cari Lynn

When my great-aunt Shirley, in her late 90s, was going through her belongings, I didn’t ask about any jewelry or valuables but instead fixated on a broken metal strainer.

The strainer, Aunt Shirley told me, had been carried by my paternal great-grandmother, just a teenager then, as the family fled the pogroms, driven from their Eastern Europe shtetl by torch-wielding mobs. With little money and only what they could carry, they made their way to Milwaukee to build a new life.

Bent and dinged, the handle broken, the little strainer wasn’t worth anything. It’s wasn’t even useful as a strainer. But I took it back with me to Los Angeles, where I had built a new life. I placed it on a shelf, among more standard display items of family photos in pretty frames and travel souvenirs. But, to me, the strainer held its own. It told the story of my family, the story of perseverance, the story of people who left everything and headed across the ocean to the unknown, attempting normalcy as they strained their daily coffee or tea. It’s what they carried.

“Just have a go-bag packed,” my L.A.-native friends casually advised a week ago, when the Santa Anas were forecast to be coming through with particular strength. I threw some socks and underwear into a suitcase. But this wasn’t packing for a trip. I stared at the suitcase, frozen by the thought: What to take if everything could be lost? What would I carry?

When I was nine years old, our home was burglarized. My parents were recent grad students—and my mom in particular shunned consumerism—so the burglars hit no jackpot. I can still envision my jewelry box with a little ballerina that twirled to musical chimes when you opened the lid.

The robbers left the jewelry box, but took the time to dump the contents of each of its small drawers—my trinket jewelry, wheat pennies, Brownie achievement pins—into a pillowcase stripped from my bed. Even as a kid I knew this stuff didn’t matter much, but my mom’s jewelry box was also emptied, and gone was one item of value, to us, at least: a cameo brooch that my maternal great-grandmother, Pearl, had carried as she fled. Different shtetl, similar torch-wielding mob story. Pearl escaped with her two young children, making her way to Rochester, New York, to start a new life.

I overheard the police talking to my parents; I learned the word “fenced.” The cameo wasn’t adorned, it had no jewels. Even the ivory profile was austere. It wasn’t a piece of jewelry to wear, but I loved it because of the story of it. But even I knew it didn’t seem worth much in drug money. The ballerina spun in an empty box. My ancestors had carried a brooch and now it was gone.

The Santa Anas howled. The branches of the apricot and avocado trees thrashed, the windows rattled, the walls moaned. The electricity flickered throughout the night, the surge and beeps of powering up and powering down, and the interminable silence and eerie blackness in between.

In the wee hours, I pulled out the go-bag. For real this time. Underwear, socks, clothes, medication. What else? I was packing for fleeing, packing for fire. I grabbed a cloth-covered childhood photo album. How many times had I noticed it and thought I really should scan those photos one of these days? I looked around. Should I grab the first editions of books I’d written? Or the foreign translations with ornate covers? What about the book awards, the statuettes and crystal deadweights? The drawings I’d done? The work of artist friends? Were my childhood diaries here somewhere, or were they safely across the country in my parents’ home? I didn’t know, couldn’t remember, couldn’t think straight. If I gathered everything that meant something I’d no longer have a go-bag, I’d need a U-Haul. Fires were erupting around the city. I was paralyzed with fear and the weight of trying to decide what mattered.

In the end, the only decision I could make was to go.

I’d often told the story of the strainer when friends would give it a quizzical look. Last year, when I moved into my house, I unpacked it and noticed something for the first time. A too-perfect etching on the broken handle. Words that belied Aunt Shirley’s turn-of-the-last century tale. I squinted as I deciphered “MADE IN ITALY.” The strainer, it turned out, was a fraud. Maybe my ancestors had carried one like it—just not this one. But I returned it to the showcase spot on the shelf.

It hadn’t ever been worth more than its story. And now, miraculously, it had gained an epilogue.

I drove a few hours up the coast to a town that wasn’t on fire. My mind swirling with regret over the sentimental things I was now remembering that I hadn’t taken. But by the time I checked in to a hotel, I’d reached acceptance. It may all be gone when I returned.

As I pulled my suitcase from the trunk, out tumbled a shopping bag. It was stuffed with odds and ends designated for Goodwill. Not only had I never remembered to donate the bag, but I possessed the dubious talent of also forgetting to notice it whenever I opened the car trunk.

After all my agonizing, attempting to prioritize the personal value of one possession over another, what I ended up carrying were things I had intended to part with.

When I called to tell my mom, she laughed. She, too, had been driving around for, who knows how long, with a bag destined for Goodwill.

There it was, I suppose. My story. The story of inherited trauma of generations forced to flee. The story of growing up knowing it could all be lost—to pogroms, to robbers, to fire. Growing up knowing it was the stories, not the stuff. It was the people, not what they carried.

[Cari Lynn is a journalist and the author of several books of nonfiction. You can view her work at www.carilynn.net and find her on social media @ACatchyHandle]

ONE ART

By Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

I appreciate Cari’s willingness to share her story. When I caught up with her a couple of days ago, she said she had packed up all of her childhood things and shipped them back to her parents’ home in the Midwest.

She’s keeping the strainer with her.

Glancing around my own crowded home, I’m overwhelmed by both the idea of taking it all with me, and of letting it all go. And I realize that Cari is right: Our stories are our most valuable possessions.

Thank you for ending — and starting — your week with me!

If you’ve made it to the end of this newsletter, please let me know by shooting me a “heart.” And — I read and appreciate all of your comments.

Love,

Amy