Helping after the James Street fire

How often can you find a roof to live under while the fire consuming your house is still burning? What are the chances of sitting at a table in front of a warm meal, or laying on a bed you can already can call your own, while your own beds and tables and chairs are rapidly disappearing from the rooms now opened to the sky by the blaze? If hardly anything could prepare you for the disorienting blow of seeing your years-in-the-making Present vanish in minutes, nothing could be more miraculous than others’ combined efforts to help you rebuild a Future. It was during that long afternoon, when we watched our rooms, objects, memories - the pieces of our lives - become smoke, and later during the following days as rain worked hard to finish the job, that the gentleness and strength of the human spirit spoke in one voice. People we used to meet every day or only once a year, all too familiar or less remembered faces, names from our cell phone contact lists or from business cards stuck on the fridge, colleagues and acquaintances started at once a breathtaking and generous pilgrimage. From houses ready to receive us to furniture to fill them with, from a microwave to T-shirts, from food to shoes and blankets and money and life-saving teenagerish items: the iPod and the curling iron, from something for all of us to something for each one of us, every single item one may think of in a time of need was offered wholeheartedly. During the next few days, hundreds of cars passed slowly on James Street, stopping for a few moments in front of the burnt house. Natural human curiosity: -How did it happen? -Look at those charred beams! -See those fluttering curtains in front of the blackened room? -Who lived here? -What happed to them?... They didn’t and couldn’t then know the whole story: it is not the house, the fire, us, what’s lost or what’s left that should become the subject of their awe. It is the people named below that everybody should talk about, and praise: Sherry Abeson, Milford; Jerry Beaver, Twin Lakes; Doris and Sol Beaver, Florida; Isabelle Braverman, Port Jervis; Dave and Denise Burke, Effort; Sherri Edelman, Shohola; and Jules and Ilene Egyud, Goshen. Gabriela Arizan Milford