At 17, My Childhood Home Burned to the Ground
Hazy reflections of a Los Angeles native
At 17, I watched my childhood home burn.
That’s not true. I didn’t even get the morbid satisfaction of watching the flames dance and lick the barn-red wooden walls of our 1952 ranch-style house—with its asymmetric facade, brick fireplace, oak bar, and sliding glass doors out to the backyard pool. And I can’t say my childhood extinguished before my very eyes.
I arrived after the fact.
I was in second period econ when my teacher received a phone call for my rare summons to the principal’s office. And it was she who personally drove me to my house that was reportedly on fire. She may have been fulfilling her duty to her student body. Or maybe it was because her husband was the track and field coach and I was a league-champion sprinter. She stopped a block away from my house, at the fire department’s barrier. I got out and ran for my life, it seemed, for the first time.
What happens to you when your life burns? It’s not some symbolic born-again gesture.
I arrived before my mother, whose tears were audible over the phone as she drove from her Hollywood job at the Magic Castle. I arrived late, like most people arrive at the…
