AN APARTMENT FIRE REVEALS WHAT SHE WOULD SAVE SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE Date: Friday, July 2, 1999 Section: Source: By LINDA SEEBACH Scripps Howard News Service Memo: COLUMN For SUNDAY release (Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Denver Rocky Mountain News.) Edition: We had a fire in our apartment building last week. Only a small fire - when we were allowed back inside, we could see it amounted to little more than a few square yards of burned carpet in the first-floor hallway, and a lot of soot on the freshly painted walls. But it was thoroughly terrifying. When the smoke alarm in the hall went off around midnight Sunday, I thought first it was probably a false alarm. We've had that happen before. But I dutifully opened my door to check, and the corridor was dense with foul black smoke. Not hot, but I wasn't going out in it anyway. I closed the door and tried not to panic. First I called 911, not wanting to be a character in one of those stories where everybody thinks somebody else did it. Memo for next time - I hope there isn't a next time - our building runs the width of the block. Give 911 the address on the parking-lot side, where the fire engines would have to come, not the post-office address side where they can't get close to the building. I thought briefly about stuffing a suitcase with a few irreplaceable things, but I didn't do it. It seemed that the difference between total devastation and one suitcase short of it really wasn't enough to bother about, under the circumstances. I made sure all the usual stuff was in my pocketbook - keys, license, checkbook, credit cards and then I went and dragged the cat out from under the bed. I'm responsible for the cat. There were lots of people in the parking lot by then, and I dangled the cat out the window. "Could somebody take my cat?" I said. "Then I can jump when I need to." I'm on the first floor, and my windows are only about eight feet from the ground, so there was nothing particularly perilous about jumping out of it. But it seemed so final. And there was the matter of form. Stand up? Sit down and slide off? Get someone to catch me? You'll notice I wasn't being nearly as rational as I thought I was. Then a fireman came pounding on my door. I explained to him about the cat, and the window, and he seemed to think that was OK, because he went away again. I suppose I should have realized at that point that the fire was out. As I heard later, a tenant who saw the flames grabbed an extinguisher and doused it even as the fire engines arrived. However it happened, I'm profoundly grateful to everybody concerned. When I got back to my windowsill there was palpably less tension in the parking lot. Somebody handed the cat back up to me. And in a couple of minutes the fireman came back - or maybe it was a different one, it's hard to tell - and told me the cat would be fine, but would I please wait in the parking lot with everybody else? It was safe to walk through the smoke, he said, and it did seem a little thinner. Like me, my neighbors had apparently opted for prompt departure over possessions. There were a lot of cat carriers, and yes, a cat carrier would have been a great idea but I hadn't had any reason to use it since I moved to Denver two years ago, and I had no idea which closet it was at the back of. One woman had a small plastic terrarium containing a rather agitated turtle. After half an hour or so we were told we could go back inside, and indeed the cat was fine, though somewhat displeased with her undignified handling. She'll get over it. So that's all the story, except I keep going over in my mind what I should have done. As for what I had in my pocketbook, I could easily and usefully have added my passport. And once upon a time I made a list of all the numbers that rule my life, account numbers, 800-notification numbers, passwords and PINs. That would have been worth taking except I put it in such a safe place that I can't remember where it is. But mostly I fret about that suitcase I didn't pack, because I always come back to the conclusion that what I would have saved, before even my family pictures and my mother's wedding ring, was my income tax records. It was only last year that I finally got my accounts unscrambled after crucial records mislaid themselves when my apartment was tossed by the 1994 Northridge Earthquake in California. It was nerve-wracking and ultimately very expensive and I most definitely do not want to go through that again. But I really hate having found out that in an emergency the two most important things in my life are the cat and the Internal Revenue Service.