Stop, Drop, and Roll

Fire was the bogeyman of my childhood

Photo by Soff Garavano Puw on Unsplash

As a young child, I can remember being talked to about “stranger danger” only once. It was at a YMCA summer camp when I was nine years old. But I didn’t spend a lot of my time worrying about creepy old men in panel vans.

No, the real malevolent force in my life was fire. Raised in Chicago, a city that has the losses that fire can bring burned into its DNA, I was taught on TV and in school to not open doors that felt warm and to “Stop, Drop, and Roll” if I burst into flames.

In those early school years, it felt as though every week some new terrible house fire had killed someone, usually young children. I know now that smoke inhalation is a much greater risk in house fires than flames, but at the time, I feared being chased around by a small flame, anxious to consume me.

Every night, the news seemed to show a family standing outside of a smoking ruin in tears. The bravest among them, sometimes the mother, sometimes the father, would pull their family close and say, “At least we’re all okay,” and the entire family would start to cry. But sometimes some child or old person would be lost and the neighbor would be on camera as the family wailed in the background.

And my own neighborhood, poor and full of decrepit homes, seemed to have a particular…