If you believe in magic, you know one of is most quoted proverb: Whatever you sow, you reap three-fold. It’s a common philosophy. If you’re a mean nasty bitch, then most likely, people are going to be mean nasty bitches to you. You get what you give. Slap it on a bumper sticker, add a couple of ‘thees’ and ‘thous,’ and Leviticus 198:15 on it and you have an instant church-parking-lot classic. I believe that magic is all around us, everyday. We don’t always know that it’s there, but if you look sometimes, you can see its tendrils creeping through the sidewalks of your mind.
My father when I was growing up wasn’t a real charmer. Myself - I considered him to be somewhat of an asshole. My first memories are of the two of them fighting; my tiny fragile mother battling against the hulk of my father. My father was always toned and in shape, so much stronger than us. When his rage broke free he used all his strength to terrify us. It wasn’t until shortly before my eighteenth birthday, when he had his accident, that he lost his control of our household. He was working at the time in construction of some sort. I was seventeen. I tried to think of my father as little as possible. I was going to college. Sure it was one town over and the hometown of most of my dad’s family. It was out that place. I had long been resentful of his antics and was ecstatic to finally be eighteen and out from under my parent’s ultra-conservative run of my life. You know: standard overwrought Thursday-night teen drama.
He and another man were burning empty concrete bags. Dad was always a bit accident prone, but I secretly wondered if it wasn’t some strange karmic intervention; payback at last for his abusive nature. He was slinging gasoline on the flames when the wind blew suddenly against him. His co-worker said it happened in an instant. One moment he standing there fine as you can, the next he was ablaze, screaming and thrashing. The echo in my mind of what he must have sounded like kept me awake for weeks.
We were at home when the call came. Mom had just walked in the door, carrying bags of White Castles. The phone rang and she set the bags on the table. I remember I was starving and the only one home. I wasn’t paying attention to the terror and hysteria that had seized my mother’s throat. Then she began to scream. She was out the door before the line was broken, muttering something about dad and an accident – going to the hospital – she’d be home later. The house was empty. I spent the evening anxiously ingesting 52 white-castles with cheese before collapsing at the base of the toilet. When she returned my mother informed me that fire had consumed 70% of my father’s body, and that they had flown him 80 miles east to Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville. She was only here to get some clothes and she was then gone again into the night. The next few months were like that. Mom home long enough to cry and smoke two packs of cigarettes and get a change of clothes. I spent my last summer alone at home agonizing whether it was my hatred that turned the wind that afternoon.
Fast forward two years: a giant flop of an adult, I had dropped out of college and was living back at home with my parents. I had taken up residence in a one room house on my parents land. Half of the quarters belonged to my dad and all of his work-shop type belongings, the other half was my make-shift kingdom. I had been living there for about six months when one day on the way to work, I emptied an ashtray. I had been at work for maybe an hour when the call came that my house was on fire, come home immediately. When I got there, there wasn’t any ‘there’ left, just the bare floor where the house had once stood.
For months afterward, I lost myself in the eager claws of depression and paranoia. I couldn’t leave my new place without first pacing from room to room, checking ashtrays and plugs, inhaling the air for signs of smoke. My parents got an insurance check and spent it themselves. That year when I got my income tax check I remember blowing the entire amount in the mall, rushing from store to store, seemingly trying to repurchase every item I ever owned.
Gradually I began to loosen up when it came to fire and my desperate avoidance. I could sit in a room with a fireplace and not collapse into a panic, could smell the aroma of burning meat on the grill without feeling the wave of nausea. I had officially moved on with my life. Then it happened again.
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