It is beyond my comprehension how, after many years of marriage, vast reservoirs of personal memories can gush forth when we least expected them..

That’s what happened one day on a four hour drive with Charlie from our home in Brooklyn to our country house in Afton.

On and off throughout the years my late husband had doled out bits and pieces of “Life Before Shelly,” which included an ex-wife and four children.

“Four children!” I gasped in horror on our first date.

“What four children?” He responded innocently, looking around himself as if they might be hiding under a mushroom cap.

By and large, though, unless specific realities from “ago” impinged upon our present lives, we were content to leave the past in the past. Except for the stories. Which Charlie related piecemeal as they occurred to him and as the mood struck. Mostly, since I’d met him when he was a supervising fire marshal, the stories were about his experiences investigating fires.

I remember a cute one about a lady dwarf who had called the fire department after a flaming arrow was shot through an open window of her house, and had embedded itself in her living room wall. Charlie never caught the bowman / arsonist, but he chuckled for years about how the house was immaculate up to about four feet from the floor, which was as far at the tiny lady could reach with her sponge.

He told me another about a man who had set fire to his girlfriend’s apartment, and how he chased the felon over fences, through alleys, and up streets, finally ending at the subway yard in Queens. There, the bad guy, out of breath and strength, threw himself on a railroad track, reached out with his hand, and shouted, “Back off, or I’ll touch the third rail!” Charlie, in his mid-forties at the time, a cigarette smoker, and no Olympic athlete, also huffing and puffing, wheezed out, “Touch it already. Touch it. I’ll cry at your funeral.”

Since I was researching arson when I met him, such tales were gold nuggets to me that I could tuck away for future reference.

But I had not known Charlie throughout the twenty-odd years that he was a fireman, rescuing children, extinguishing fires, and risking his life on dozens of runs in a single day during the violent and incendiary 1970s. Those were the years before he was promoted to the Bureau of Fire Investigation and began to investigate the origin and cause of fires.

Charlie’s favorite memories of that time were of working at Ladder Company 105 on Dean Street in Brooklyn. Even so, the stories were few and far between. At least, until the day we traveled across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, up the New Jersey Turnpike, and onto the NYS thruway.

He was the driver, and I was the passenger, so I was free to watch him closely as he drove. As soon as we turned west on route 17, it was as if he had fallen into a trance or suddenly become the speaker of a pre-recorded message that could not be turned on or off. Without preamble, he began to reminisce about his life as a fireman. He spoke nonstop. A flawless, mesmerizing performance interrupted by no ers or ums. I listened rapt the entire time, uttering not a single word.

Do you remember the Jim Croce song “If I could save time in a bottle”? In looking back on those hours and on that car trip, I wish I could take a bottle out of my pocket every now and again, hear Charlie’s voice, listen to his tales, and revel in his joy at having lived a fireman’s life.

And I wish I remembered every story. I’ve only retained bits and pieces, though, like...

The time he was in a tenement building in Red Hook, fighting his way up the stairs to check the top floors for people trapped in the fire. He had moved into a room on the fourth floor when smoke suddenly obscured his vision. He blindly took another step forward, and felt something “spongy” underfoot. Second later, the smoke cleared, he looked down, and saw that he was standing on the cushion of a sofa precariously balanced on a tiny wedge of unburned flooring suspended over a three-story drop to the basement. The rest of the room had completely collapsed.

My heart jumps to my throat just thinking about it.

Or the time Charlie was fighting a colossal fire in a multiple dwelling in Brownsville, and when the conflagration was brought under control, seeing his hero, Captain Nolan, stagger out of the ruins, his face covered in grime, his shoulders slumped, and his helmet completely burned off except for the broad rim, which hung around his shoulders like a yoke. As we drove, Charlie repeated what Captain Nolan wearily said as he headed back to the firehouse. Immortal words that have stuck in my head like an anthem: “I think I’ll bunk down for a while with the boys.”

Or the day Charlie was working part-time to make extra money and was painting the exterior of a house across a narrow walkway from another house ... one whose door to the ground floor was open.

Without knowing how it had happened, he (Charlie laughed when he told this story) suddenly fell off his ladder, toppled across the narrow walkway and through the open door into the neighboring house, and tumbled down the cellar steps, never letting go of his paint can and splashing paint every which way as he fell. When the astonished homeowner found him sprawled at the bottom of the stairs, Charlie bounced to his feet, brushed himself off, smiled warmly, and pointing to the paint splattered walls, said, “On me. I won’t charge you for the work” as he rushed up the stairs and out of the house.

There was also a story about having been transferred to Ladder 2 on East 51st Street in Manhattan. His voice unperturbed, but his words indignant, he said that the rich people in Midtown expected firefighters to take off their foot gear before they entered the hallowed halls of their burning apartments to extinguish a fire, lest their grimy boots dirtied the rugs.

He told another about working as a roofer – also a part-time job – and confronting a snarling German shepherd on the roof. That was the day he formulated his philosophy of canine interaction, which he espoused for the rest of his life: “Big dogs bite big. Little dogs bite little.”

One of my favorites, which he related wistfully, was about how, before the fire department started to pay overtime, “When a call came in at the end of a shift and the next shift of firemen were coming on duty, both groups jumped onto the apparatus at the same time and – for the sheer joy of it – fought the fire together.” Charlie believed, and other old-timers I’ve spoken to over the years agreed, that “Overtime ruined the job.”

There were so many other stories. A four-hour monologue of them. So it wasn’t just Jim Croce who wished he could save time in a bottle.

Daphne Du Maurier wrote a wonderful paragraph in her novel REBECCA, where a young woman on the cusp of falling in love muses,”If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”

Often in my mind, I am back on Route 17. Charlie is driving, and he is unraveling cherished moments from his past for me like images on a spool of film.

It’s all gone now, except for my memory of his memories.

Not as much as I wish I had. But ... enough.

Copyright © Shelly Reuben, 2023. Shelly Reuben’s books have been nominated for Edgar, Prometheus, and Falcon awards. For more about her writing, visit www.shellyreuben.com