Acrid smoke filled my kitchen, as I animatedly fanned to keep it out of the hallway where the smoke detector was located. I opened up the kitchen window and the sliding glass door – to my dismay, probably the only day in recent memory with practically no wind – to encourage the smoke to leave the house and ended up setting up a fan in addition to turning on the fan over the range.
I was making pizza. What I had forgotten was the cheesy pizza that I had in my oven LAST time and how I perhaps hadn’t cleaned up the cheese that had dripped onto the bottom of the oven. I was sitting in the family room, reading and watching football and was distracted enough not to notice how bad the smoke had gotten until it was almost out of hand.
Even now, several hours later (and several hours of windows open with mid-30’s temperatures outside), my eyes burn a little and I have a headache. I went outside with the dog and when I came back inside, immediately I wanted to leave because of the smell. I wondered whether burnt cheese had any toxins in it that I needed to worry about.
At the same time, my book for the afternoon is “The Only Plane In The Sky: An Oral History of 9/11”. It is one of the most terrible, heart-wrenching, inspiring and important books that I’ve ever read. To hear the words of the survivors and how they made it through one of the worst days in our country’s history gave me both goosebumps and moved me to tears.
I recall how many of them talk about the smoke and the heat and the debris and how hard it was to see and breathe. No matter how many accounts I read or photos I see or videos I watch, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to conceive of what they went through.
And I laugh at myself; this is certainly not even close to the worst thing in the world (even less so since the pizza itself was yummy and not burnt at all). My smoky kitchen is in no way a comparison, but the juxtaposition serves as a reminder that my life is pretty damn good. And that this inconvenience allows me to be grateful for all the bad things that DIDN’T happen.