Dusty Corners of My Mind

Part VII in the Blog-A-Week Series

In addition to my normal blog entry, I am introducing a new feature this week: the DecaAwesome List. It's a top ten of things that have been awesome this week. I plan to make this a weekly feature and I might just make it its own entry. Stay tuned...

On the way driving to work today, I smelled tar. They must have been doing some road work or something, because as I drove by Alvarado on the 101, I smelled the unmistakable odor of tar. This smell has very powerful memories for me. When I was living in the Hunter dorms many moons ago (somewhere around 11-14 years ago), maintenance folks were re-tarring the roof of my dorm and the adjoining south building. The smell of tar permeated the air for weeks on end. God only knows what kind of lung disease I developed just from living there. So whenever I smell tar, it always reminds me of this particular period in my college history. And furthermore, it reminds me of a particular incident.

I was sitting in my dorm room, good old 1053 (spent every fall and spring there for 5 years). It was probably early afternoon. I want to say it was a Saturday...in Spring. And all of a sudden, the fire alarms started going off. I ignored them as I had learned to do from dozens of false alarms over the years. Until I heard commotion in the common area. I opened my door and leaned out to find people milling about and one very panic-stricken girl pushing the elevator button frantically and muttering something like, "On fire. It's on fire. Heh. FIRE." I turned around, grabbed a pair of shoes, my wallet, and my keys and fled down the stairs calling over to Panic Girl: "You don't take the elevator in a fire, you take the stairs." When I got outside, I joined a crowd of folks, and then I saw that the roof of the south building was en fuego. At first, I breathed a sigh of relief because my building wasn't in any immediate danger, but I reminded myself that fire is unpredictable, and that the two buildings were, in fact, connected. The more practical part of my brain started making a list of irreplaceable things I might have been about to lose.

I stood out there with my friend Dan and got giggly. I tend to do that when I'm not immediately involved in a situation. After a while of watching and smelling the tar burn (fire is a mesmerizing sight), a bunch of us--some in pajamas and slippers--walked to a Starbucks a couple of blocks away. There wasn't anything that we could do about the fire, so we figured: latte. Or in my case, a nice cup of tea.

There's something special about those moments that are so far out of the ordinary that they stand out. I knew it was unlikely I'd ever see the dorm fire again, and we also figured out that the FDNY had the situation well in hand right away. So we sat in Starbucks, sipping our drinks, savoring the uniqueness of the moment. A moment that I always remember when the good people of L.A. County public works are filling a pothole or patching up some street I'm driving by.

Amazing how the mind remembers such details. The smell of tar will forever remind me of: college, the dorm, Dan, fire, Panic Girl, and sitting in Starbucks across from someone wearing pajamas and bunny slippers.

~Hero