Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [77]
Cynthia is still standing in front of the firehouse, and I can see the happiness in her face as the pumper backs into quarters. I take her into the firehouse, and explain the difference between the long ladder trucks and the pumpers. I show her the equipment we use. She questions everything as a star reporter would, and scribbles furiously in her notebook. She is a very bright child, and it gives me great satisfaction to talk to her. Her apprehensiveness has changed to self-confidence, and her questions are phrased concisely and intelligently. Her speech is flawless. She is the first child of her family to be born in the States.
“Are you responsible for other things besides putting out fires or, I should say, extinguishing fires?” she asks. We have had commissioners in this job, I think to myself, who would not be capable of phrasing a question so well. I explain our building inspection duties, our hydrant inspection duties, our community relations program, and our fire prevention duties. She questions everything intensely. I tell her about our committee work, and how we keep the firehouse clean. “Oh, we have a man in our school who does work like that,” she says. “He’s called the custodian, but why don’t you hire a man like that for your firehouse?” Very perceptive child indeed. Rather than try to answer her question, a question I have been thinking about for as long as I have been a firefighter, I ask her, “What do you want to be when you finish with your schooling?”
“Oh,” she begins most of her sentences with “Oh,” “I don’t think about it very much. Right now I just think about getting into a good high school, like Bronx School of Science. Maybe I’ll be a teacher, or a lawyer—I wrote a report about the Supreme Court last year.”
I am about to ask her if she ever thought about becoming a journalist, but she quickly puts another question to me. “I really must be getting home,” she says, “but I want to ask you the most’important question.”
“Go right ahead,” I say.
“Well, what do you think I can do to help the Fire Department? What can I tell the boys and girls in my class to do?”
I know the answer to this question as well as a White House switchboard operator knows the President’s extension, for each time a group of schoolchildren comes to the firehouse we try to impress upon them the importance of three things.
“First,” I answer her, “you should not play with matches, or start any kind of fire.” This seems like a banal and rudimentary answer for Cynthia, but she writes it in her book, and I continue, “Second, ask all your friends never to pull a false alarm, and third, ask your parents never to smoke in bed, and to be careful of their cigarettes at all times.”
Cynthia finishes her writing, puts her pencil and book in her left hand, and offers her right hand to me.
“Thank you, Mr. Smith,” she says, “you have been very helpful.” And then she turns and walks out of the firehouse with as professional an air as I have ever seen.
The subject of kids is usually a sad one to us, and my little talk with Cynthia makes me feel light and happy. This neighborhood is a scries of garbage heaps, and the kids use the garbage-strewn backyards and vacant lots as playgrounds. They build forts in the refuse, and the enemy burns them down. Many times they set fires just to get firefighters there—a diversion in their play that gives them a chance to climb on the apparatus, making monkey bars of the ladder truck.
Talking to Cynthia has made me feel good, because I realize that there must be many children like her in the South Bronx, and she represents the future as I want to see it. It is unfortunate though, that we don’t get to see many Cynthias. We see kids in filthy clothes playing in filthy alleyways, or on hot summer days swimming in filthy street-corner ponds caused by backed-up sewers. Kids that jeer at us, and throw things at us. But, we have been into their homes. We have seen the holes in their walls, the rats in their halls, and the roaches scrambling over their bedsheets. It is not difficult to understand why