The things we carry

There was, of course, a certain frantic, arbitrary quality to the filling of the trash bags, the sirens growing louder and the minutes ticking away, but in truth I was able also to work up a kind of dark satisfaction at the idea that the material items we loved most in the world were bagged and en route to safety with us while the lesser possessions were quite possibly about to go up in flames. (I'll be honest here -- I was rooting against three of Bill's ties.) And when my half hour was up and my car could hold no more -- Bill had already taken the children and headed across the Bay Bridge to their grandparents' house -- I stood on our sidewalk with my neighbor, who had sent his family south in their other car.

My neighbor said he supposed he had all the heirlooms that would fit in the Subaru. I said we had no heirlooms, which was just as well. Then I remembered that six months earlier my mother in Minnesota had inexplicably shipped me the family silverware, boxed and formally appraised, and that I had been so rattled by the arrival of this expensively pedigreed hand-me-down that I had hidden the box in the attic, where I thought thieves would not be able to find it. "Oh, hell," I said to my neighbor, "we do have an heirloom." He lent me his flashlight and I went upstairs one more time, the attic air thick with gathering smoke, me grubbing around amid boxes trying to remember where I had hidden the family silver. When I found it, I stuck it under one arm and came downstairs to hold it aloft for my neighbor; small parody of fireman triumphant, I thought. My mother would be pleased.

The fire never reached us. It wasn't until the next morning that we knew. The night we evacuated, my husband and I lay in the darkness on a spare bed at my father's house in San Francisco, listening to broadcast reports of the fire's progress block by block, imagining the flames, the things we had saved, the things we had chosen to leave. I felt no wave of anticipatory mourning, interestingly, until I remembered the pajamas: one small pair, blue and white, stuffed in the back of my son's closet. My son grew out of them when he was 3 and I had guessed, correctly, how completely the memory of that compact little body would leave me unless I kept some tangible item I could lay out once in a while to remember what it was like. The prospect of the pajamas burning filled me with panic, and some weeks later, when it was over, when the grandparent pictures had gone back up in the dining room and the smoke had been scrubbed off the walls, I found that I was grateful not only for the reprieve but for the chance to know how high a single pair of child's pajamas ranked among the things I valued most.

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