By Dr. JanMa — Janet Gentleman-Ingersoll, PhD
I was not there when it started.
I was with my mom at the restaurant we owned at the Rensselaer airport when a cook, who had apparently known for fifteen minutes or more, casually mentioned that the fire department had called. Our house was on fire.
My mother called home. No answer. She called our neighbor, Theresa Blankenship, about a mile north, and asked if she could see if the house was burning.
“It looks like a shed or a barn,” Theresa answered.
We had hope!
We prayed the whole way home. Two college students my father had just hired to work the feedlot were in the pickup with us as my mother raced toward our home. We watched the smoke rise for miles.
Dear God, let it be the shed or a barn.
About a mile south of home, a burned Wm. Gentleman and Sons invoice blew across the road in front of our pickup. My mother stopped. Got out. Picked it up.
She knew.
That invoice carried more than my father’s name. It represented 100 years of Gentleman history.
The final mile was the longest mile of our lives.
We stopped in the road at a distance from the house. We could see the flames. We could see the smoke. We could see my father wringing his burned hand. We could not see my brothers and sisters anywhere. Fire trucks blocked us from getting closer. The two college students physically held me back, keeping me at the pickup, while my mother ran to my dad.
I stood there, tears streaming down my cheeks, confusion and terror engulfing every cell of my body as I watched our gorgeous antique baby grand piano fall to the floor. Memories of countless hours learning notes, chords, music and the peace they gave my soul, gone, before my eyes.
I watched my parents’ brass bed melt. Memories of naps I did not take on that bed as I imagined a sailing ship or a magic carpet visiting exotic places around the globe. Gone, melted into a puddle amidst flames and smoke.
Three generations of irreplaceable antique furniture, my great-grandparents’ pieces, my grandparents’ pieces, furniture that held the stories of people I had never met, but was made of, gone. My mother’s lifelong coin collection. Gone. The home my father had been remodeling with his own hands, the dream he had been building for our family of eight. Gone.
But my father was standing there wringing his burned hand.
And eventually, because of what he had done that morning, so were Mac, Bob, and Jeannie.
Here is what had happened while my mother and I were racing home, praying.
All of my siblings had been in the kitchen with Dad when Billy opened the basement door. The fire had started below. The backdraft was instant and catastrophic. Dad grabbed Billy and Jill and got them out. Billy, without being told, without being trained, just knowing, moved both family cars away from the burning house so they would not catch fire.
He was in second grade.
But three of my youngest siblings ran the other direction, and they were still inside. Mac, Bob, and little Jeannie had heard the explosion of fire and done what frightened small children do. They ran and hid. Under a bed. In a burning house.
My father tied a rope around his waist, secured it to something outside, wrapped a bandana around his nose and mouth, and crawled into the fire.
He came out without them.
He went back in.
He came out without them.
The third time, he told me years later, it was so hot and so dark with smoke that he was beginning to believe it was futile. That he might not find them. That he might not come back out himself.
And then he heard it.
One small whimper. One tiny sound from somewhere in that smoke-filled darkness.
That was enough.
He found them. He got them out. Mac, Bob, and Jeannie lived because my father refused to stop at twice.
Theresa Blankenship, God bless her, had not waited to be asked twice either. The moment she hung up the phone after my mother’s call, she got in her car and raced over. She found Jill, who had stepped on two nails in the chaos, and took all five of my siblings to her home, where she cared for them until we arrived.
That is what neighbors do. That is what community does. That is what my parents had always modeled for us. You show up. You do not wait to be asked.
Every holiday growing up, our table was bigger than our family. My parents welcomed strangers who needed a warm meal and a happy memory, and I grew up thinking that was simply what people did. It took me years to understand how rare it actually was.
What are you willing to go back into?
What rope are you willing to tie around your waist?
Your best and bravest chapter may still be ahead of you.
Don’t just get older — get BOLDER.
Come back next week for Part 2 — the rest of William’s extraordinary story, and what a bed-ridden cattle buyer taught me about the courage to learn.
