The Ghost Story About the Oakland Fire

When the former Future Mother of My Unborn Grandchildren posted “Safe” in Facebookland, I immediately thought, OhmiGAWD: What if Max was there?

I mean, of course he wasn’t.

But that’s how mothers think.

I lived two and a half miles from the site of the conflagration for several years. Right up the hill. Oakland is a city of micro-neighborhoods: My neighborhood was utterly adorable, but two blocks away sprawled the urban horror that was Fruitvale Boulevard.

When I lived in Oakland, I hadn’t yet developed an interest in what BB calls “economic geography.” I vaguely understood from the huge, decaying Victorian mansions that lined Fruitvale that it hadn’t always been the way it was when I lived so close to it, but I wasn’t obsessive the way I am today about looking for the clues to its decline.

I see that they renamed East 14th Street “International Avenue.” I wonder what they thought that would accomplish?

Again, one might think that living close to the water would offer so many aesthetic advantages that the wealthy would have pissed collectively along the length of East 14th Street to demarcate their views and their Bay breezes. But that is never the case. The wealthy always head for the hills; the poor are left with the gulches.

###

I did absolutely nothing yesterday, but for some reason, I was very popular, so my phone kept going off all day long.

In the afternoon, I finally roused myself enough to go off for a short tromp.

Along the way, I met this guy:



Can you see him?

I don’t think I ever realized before that deer are the color they are because they blend in so well with the colors of winter.

###

Come to think of it, I was probably so out of it yesterday because I’d drunk a third of a bottle of expensive pink champagne the night before.

Caro and Benito invited me to join them for dinner. Benito made ramen from scratch:



Benito also made an elaborate English trifle:



And bought a bottle of expensive pink champagne.

A delicious meal but a strange meal.

But that isn’t what I want to remember.

Caro is a nursing assistant at a very tony Assisted Living facility in New Paltz.

Well. They call them “Assisted Living” facilities, but actually, they’re Assisted Dying facilities.

Caro recently transferred to working nights, so we were batting around the pros and cons of working nights: For the first two years of my nursing career, I worked nights.

“Well, they pay you more, and of course, there’s usually absolutely nothing to do on nights,” I said. “Except struggle to stay awake. But have you noticed that when people die, they always do it at 4 o’clock in the morning?”

“Yep!” Caro nodded.

“And have you noticed that you can always tell when they’re going to die?”

“Definitely,” Caro said. “Even if they’re lying there motionless, you can always tell if the person is still in there somewhere, or if they're getting ready to make the jump. Plus –“ She exchanged a glance with Benito.

“Tell her!” Benito said. “She’ll like it!”

“One of my primaries died a week ago. And all day long, she kept asking me, ‘Who are those children laughing in the garden?’

“’What children, Mrs. Bethel?’ I asked.

“’The children! The children! I don’t like that game they’re playing –‘”

“Weird!” I said.

“But she isn’t the only person who heard those children,” Caro said. Caro began reeling the names off of various patients.

“Is there a backyard at the place where you work where children sometimes play?” I asked.

“No. Oh, no,” Caro scoffed.

“Did all those patients die?”

“Oh, no! Of course not! Only three of them.”

Only three of them.

I love the detail of children’s laughter as a prognosticator of death.

###

Those photos of the Oakland fire victims are heartbreaking.

You could write a really eerie ghost story about them. If they were characters in a story.

Vignettes from their lives. As they go about their days. Always with the echo of children's laughter in the background.

One of them, a conscientious boy, goes to visit his aging grandmama in a decaying mansion off Fruitvale Boulevard. "I swear, JT, if I could still walk, I'd march out there, scare off them kids," she tells him. "They making too damn much noise."

"They ain't nobody out there," says JT.

At night, the characters all go to the rave...