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| Tuesday, September 26, 2006 |
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Quote du jour 
| | Steve Gillmor: I have no quarrel with links, just a profound love for the economy of gestures. |
| | An perhaps an "economy of gestures is exactly what I'm talking about here. And here. |
Not just a condition you get, living near Charlotte
An appreciation
| | Half a century ago, I grew up in a neighborhood of cops and firemen. Jack Burke, father of nine, was a New Jersey Highway Patrol officer who worked on the Turnpike. The Burkes lived next door. The dad cross the street, Frank Cilento, was a New York plainclothes detective. The fire chief's house, three doors away and around the corner, overlooked the Burke's back yard, ours, and the rest of the street. |
| | Except for the fire chief's house, the whole street was new in 1953, a typical little inner-suburb fill-in development, populating what had lately been woods. We were closer to Central Park than parts of Queens and Brooklyn. And we felt safe. I don't remember anybody locking their doors. I started walking alone to school, half a mile away and across several busy crossings, at age 5. |
| | Cops and firemen were the human anchors of our civic life. They were hard-working men and women who left home early, came home late, and still coached our ball teams. They weren't idols. They were just hard-working parents doing work we all knew was tough and sometimes dangerous. More importantly, they stood between us and the dangers we knew were out there. |
| | I've been thinking a lot about the men and women like them today. Around four thousand are still fighting the Day Fire, which has taken most of Sepbember to burn more than 143,000 acres of extremely rough country. Imagine a wooded Grand Canyon and you begin to get the idea. Or just look at the pictures I put up yesterday, shot last January from the safety and distance of a passing airplane. |
| | According to the LA Times this morning, the fire has jumped 'dozer breaks and is advancing toward Lockwood Valley. Yesterday evening, as the kid and I flew a kite at the beach, we watched the orange and white air tankers flying in and out of Santa Barbara Airport. Their work is far from done. |
| | Last night our local TV station featured some firefighters surfing at the beach in Ventura, where they are currently camped. It was nice to see these men getting some well-deserved rest from 12-hour shifts on a dangerous and backbreaking job. But TV is all too often about impressions, and this wasn't the best one. (The station did have coverage of the fire, but nothing as close and personal as the footage of 'fighters on the beach.) |
| | So I'd just like to give some neighborly appreciation to the good folks standing between the rest of us and the very real dangers of life in the country's most flammable state. |
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