Angels Too Soon

Somewhere in a nightmare a little girl is screaming as she jumps from a high second-story window, her hair and clothing on fire…

I wake up with a jolt, drenched in sweat.
It’s 3 A.M.
There’s no going back to sleep.
Squeezing past my dogs so as not to disturb them, I get up, pad across the cold floor to the bay window and look out at the frigid moonlit night.

I was only seven years old on that afternoon when fire broke out at Our Lady of the Angels school in Chicago. We might still have been living in the city; I can’t remember. Don’t know how I got the image of that little girl seared into my brain. Maybe I saw it on the news, or someone described it, or – hell, I don’t know.

92 children and 3 nuns died.
It was stupid.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Everyone knew damn well what fire safety measures that school ought to have had in place. But the school got “grandfathered” by them. So no fire doors, inaccessible fire extinguishers, inaccessible fire escape, not enough fire alarms, no sprinkler system….

Just a fire door on the second floor might have prevented ANY fatalities.
One damn fire door.
95 lives for a fire door.
Doesn’t seem like a good trade to me.

I wonder if we’ve learned anything since then. I still see people -- even firefighters -- stupidly ignore important rules -- rules designed to save lives – of civilians AND firefighters. But these rules too often get lip service with a wink and a nod and nothing more. That’s what happened at Our Lady of the Angels, too. We had rules, GOOD rules. We just didn’t obey them.

That’s stupid.

In my nightmare, I try to reach in, grab that little girl, pull her to safety.
Maybe one day, I will.
Then she and I can both rest easy.


sj