Keep the home fires burning
We were bundled up and huddled in the hallway above the furnace grate, shouting our encouragement to Dave, who was in the basement with the matches.
“Hurry up, Dave!” “It's cold, man!”
But under our breath, which you could see in the chill, we cursed him. Short, quick and snappy little curses that burst from our lungs and hung there in the air like visible profanity in the middle of the hallway.
The big old coal furnace was directly below the grate. There were no vents anywhere else in this two-story wooden house on Sycamore Street - four and a half bedrooms, a bath, a kitchen, two large living rooms, six college students and one floor grate.
The hallway was centrally located, where five rooms and a stairwell to the second floor fed out of it. If we closed all the doors, the hallway became a cozy little room about six feet square, and whenever the furnace went cold, we'd gather there and wait for the warmth.
We were supposed to take turns tending the furnace, making sure the stoker box was full and the fire box was clean of clinkers. Every now and then, one of us — usually it was Dave — would forget and the fire would go out.
“Come on, Dave!” “It's cold, man!”
And pieces of vaporous profanity would freeze and fall, shattering at our feet — “sh... kkk... Fff... Ttt... kt.. achh!”
That was a winter long ago, when you could rent a whole house for $125 a month and buy coal at $11 a ton. We were poor students a long way from home, back then.
But maybe that's not all together accurate.
There are days in all of our lives, I suppose, when we realize that home is not where we thought it was. For me, as a college student yearning for independence and change, that realization came during this time.
I felt more and more like a visitor every time I returned to my parents’ home. Although it was comfortable and warm there, and although I knew I always would be welcome there, it wasn't my home any more.
It was a gradual but unmistakable realization.
At Christmas, on break from school, I'd helped my father chop wood and start a fire in the fireplace. In the glow of that fire, I realized that it was a fire of ambiance, not heat, that we shared.
As enjoyable as it was to be with family for the holidays, I recall the strange elation I felt as I returned to Sycamore Street later that week.
The train had pulled into Carbondale late. A winter storm had just dumped about a foot of snow on the region, and the streets were empty, the city calm and the air crisp. I walked - the many blocks, a mile perhaps - from the station to Sycamore in the virgin white, silent night.
I knew all too well that the house would be empty and cold when I got there. But I was happy. I had a sense that I was going home, and that thought warmed me.
And I wasn't too concerned about the furnace.
A couple of weeks earlier, knowing Dave's turn to tend the fire was coming around again, I'd invested in a space heater.
That thought warmed me, too.
— 30 —
Collected written works | Gary Marx
