June 6, 2021

On Friday, my husband and I walked out of a beer store and saw a man on the phone. He was a white guy who stood about 6 feet tall, was wearing a yellow Arsenal jersey and sunglasses, and although fairly young had lost most of his hair. He was my husband's doppleganger! Wearing the same jersey my husband has even. Mitch said "Go Gunners," but the guy was on the phone and only gave him a passing acknowledgement. Disappointing. My husband wore that yellow jersey today. I wish he was wearing it Friday. Then the other guy would have known that he had met himself at the beer store. 

I'm going to hang out with some friends later this afternoon. I'm already hyping up a conversation in my head about men. Something that comes up a lot with this group is "men are bad." "White men are bad." And it's annoying. I'm annoyed by it. It's a theory on gender that basically amounts to "Girls rule. Boys drool." Surely we can do better than that. And it might, of course, just be venting, which I support. But it's hard to tell how much it's feeling and how much philosophy. 

Okay! Blog Time! 

Willis, Connie – FIRE WATCH (novelette) 

Published: 1982

Read: 06/2021

Bartholomew is a history student at Oxford at some point in the future. For his practicum, he’s going to travel back in time. But there’s been an error. Instead of sending him back to the middle east in the first century AD to travel with Saint Paul – for which he’s been preparing for four years – the computer’s sending him to 1940s London to Saint Paul’s Cathedral. It’s in the middle of the Blitz, and Bartholomew’s going to be part of the Fire Watch, the people who are tasked with making sure the cathedral doesn’t burn down in the bombing. He’s got two days to prepare. He’s only able to upload a bunch of information to his long term memory in that time – nothing in short term – so retrieval is dubious. When he gets there, he struggles. He doesn’t understand most of the words. He doesn’t know what he’s doing there. And there are bombs falling on the city every night. He sleeps in the crypt under the church with the rest of the fire watch. He suspects Langly of being a Nazi spy. He decides his mission there is to keep Langly from letting St Paul’s burn to the ground. He meets a woman named Elana who reminds him of his roommate back home. He sees and courts a cat – which are extinct in the era which he’s from. He worries about Elana, the cathedral, the cat. He doesn’t sleep. He finds the cat dead from concussion. When the tide is low and the water pumps don’t have any water, the city is hit hard. It’s burning. A landmine goes into a recess on the roof of the church, and Langly jumps in after it. Bartholomew goes down after him and realizes that Langly has put out the bomb with his body. He’s badly burnt. Bartholomew gets him out and learns that Langly thinks Bartholomew is the Nazi spy. B is whisked back to his present, where he has to take his exam. The test asks for statistics. Number of bombs. Number dead. There are only short blanks after each question. He wants to know where he can record about Langly, Elana, the cat. He can’t believe the history department is asking about these things when the people mattered so much. He hits the preceptor and is carted out. He packs up his stuff before the school can throw him out. When he gets his exam results back, he sees that he received top marks. 

This story made me cry hard. It surprised the shit out of me. I had totally forgotten the open question of “Why am I here?” He’s there to learn that each individual person mattered. The cat even mattered. The practicum was to show that aspect, when otherwise history can get so flattened. Nameless statistics. It reminded me of the Poetry of Witness class I took in college. Like that poem – its poet I forget – that describes an old woman watering her goat. It says that whoever says any person is not necessary is guilty of genocide. Necessary. The twist of the top mark hit me like a thunderclap. It’s teed up by B’s roommate telling him the preceptor is a good man. She’d already taken her practicum, but hadn’t been allowed to talk about it until B finished his. Hers was in Europe during the plague. It’s a story about great suffering, the value of human life, and about the importance of witness. 

Rating: ★★★★★