My Favorite Firefighter

I always thought I was a fancy little hippie for attending a private kindergarten in Brooklyn. My favorite teacher, Trudy, with her short white hair and decorative Mexican muu-muus, stood next to me in every class picture, including the one in which I wore the Fonzie pin and refused to smile.

To keep it simple, our classrooms were named by color: the blue room, the red room — you get the idea. We sang a lot, usually in circles; my favorite song was Paul Simon's 1966 hit, the "59th Street Bridge Song": "Kicking down the cobblestones looking for fun and feeling groovy. . ." Only I sang it real fast: "Lookatdafun and feeling groovy." And I felt groovy. Idyllic, right?

It wasn't until years later I realized this mini-Mecca with the primary-colored rooms was housed in the bottom floor of a housing project on the edge of the Sheepshead Bay section of the borough.

Inside our walls were macramé and stuffed animals, outside were cigarette butts and broken bottles still stuffed in brown paper bags trailing shards of glass that led to our entrance. I'd often find used needles on the streets. In the end, it was just as cruddy as everything else in Brooklyn at the time.

But I was oblivious — filled with innocence and wonder. I just ran into the red room, in my velvet dress, with two crooked barrettes holding my disheveled hair in place and waited for Trudy to hug me. Her embrace made everything feel safe.

For the first juncture of my life, all my besties were boys. And they always came in pairs, like mittens or socks, and it never felt right if one of them was lost. Boy companions were the bomb. They liked to do things and run without provocation.

My first pair were Josh and Eric. Since they had no sisters of their own, I was more like a toy, a cute little bunny with a hot-pink jacket. They played with me, and protected me, and I wanted to be just like them.

That was the year my mother cut my hair short. Payback for never brushing the tangles that lay like Brillo pads in my dirty blond hair. So we three took over the block. We zigzagged in and out of our neighbor's backyards, splattering our shoes with squirts of huckleberry that fell from our oversized tree, where the purple juices stuck on our hands for days.

We would listen to "Free to Be You and Me" on vinyl records and play hide and seek for hours, in and out of our Victorian homes in Ditmas Park.

Sometimes we would find secret caves in our own homes and pile up next to each other for hours until it was time to go home. I loved the feeling of placing those layers of blankets on top of our little bodies, tucking us in, and serving as a buffer to the outside world.

"Come, Elana, look what I've got," Josh said.

We were standing in the playground of our kindergarten, behind the jungle gym. He reached into his dungarees' pocket and pulled out a bent pack of matches.

"What's that for?" I asked. (Oh, to be that innocent again.)

"Look!"

He pulled off a match and tried to light it. After about five tries, it worked.

The orange flame danced in front of me.

"Wow," I said.

"I know," he said.

He blew out the match and threw the crumpled packet onto the ground. Trudy was calling us in for circle time. All the kids marched back inside. I looked around and when the coast was clear bent down and grabbed the matches and put them in my pocket.

The next morning, while playing in my room, I put the Fisher-Price pieces away and started gazing at my matchbook. I ripped off a match; it took me only three tries to light it. See, I'm better than him. I let it burn down till it burnt my fingertips and then blew it out. OK, cool, but really this was it?

I wanted to raise the stakes. I took out a large piece of cream drawing paper and folded it into a tall cone. I lit the top and I watched in amazement as the paper turned quickly to ash. I slowly blew it out, feeling elated from my new pastime.

I built the tower higher and lit a match again on the first try and waited. I counted to 10 like I was getting ready for hide and seek, but the fire didn't hide. First, it hit the Raggedy Ann blanket, then the papers hit the drawings taped to the walls of my room, and then flames took over. Thick black smoke filled the room.

I stood in my bedroom not sure what to do. I was 5 years old. I called my parents but they didn't hear me. Then I screamed as loud as I could, "Help! Help me!" and they came running up the creaky wooden stairs. Stampeding like elephants to see what was wrong.

The next thing I knew I was lying in my mother's bed, propped up with pillows and tucked into her striped quilt. I looked up and saw the most beautiful face I ever saw. It was a local fireman, tall with strawberry blond hair and blue eyes that looked like a Caribbean ocean.

I am certain that fireman with his soft gentle eyes became my first crush. He held out his fist and then slowly opened his hand. In his palm, lay three shiny quarters that he salvaged from my room.

"Thank you," I whispered. Amazed that they were still glowing and not covered in soot.

"You will be fine sweetheart," he said. "I have a daughter your age."

I thought he was going to reach down and kiss my cheek, but he handed me those shimmering quarters instead — the last remains from my room. I fell in love with all firemen from that moment on, often strolling by the firehouse on the way to school, hoping to find my hero again. A habit that would be reignited decades later, when I returned to Brooklyn in the summer of 2001.

You'd think I get in trouble. Yelled at. Maybe even a spanking. Not so. All I had to endure were a few days of a room that smelled like wet mildew. My siblings were not too happy with the odor either, but we all got to sleep in the attic in our sleeping bags until the smell subsided.

In school, a woman dressed in a long-wrap dress came to talk to me.

"What do you see in this picture?" she asked.

"A flower," I said.

She flipped through the white book and landed on another inkblot.

"What about this one?" She asked.

"Um, a man. I think I know these cards," I said.

"What do you mean?" the nice lady responded, pushing up her glasses.

"My parents have these at home. They ask lots of questions, too. They are psychoperipists (sic)."

"Psychotherapists, really?" She said smiling.

"I didn't do this on purpose. I just wanted to do what my Josh was doing — he found the matches, ya know," I said. An early narc.

Her Rorschach drawings went away, and Josh got in trouble. Probably just a time-out. I got a freshly painted room and new furniture, white cube-like stuff, and a brand-new bunk bed to store all my new toys.

The first thing I did was write my name on the pink wall. Elaᴻa (with the backward N) my custom signature, the first tag I knew. Graffiti artist already. That's what happens when you grow up in Brooklyn.

I would always be afraid of the speed of fire. And I would always be fond of the men who put them out. I left Brooklyn for other worlds but returned in time to watch the Towers collapse in September 2001.

It was a site and smell I can never forget, and I often wonder if my precious fireman was there. Because I never got a chance to thank him for saving my allowance all those years ago — and, more importantly, making this little girl feel safe.