Fire Engine Memory Science

North Caldwell, NJ: Before there was Tony Soprano, there was us.

Preliminary obligatory: Zole

At a party here on Martha’s Vineyard about a dozen years ago a friend told this story about her two sons, who were then around 2 and 3 years old. Seems that the boys had started to use the word ‘zole’ in their toddler conversations; in particular they said it when they were in their carseats in the back and she was driving.

Mother: What does ‘zole’ mean? What are you even saying?
Kids: Zole! Zole! 

Then one day my friend found herself sitting in the shotgun seat in her mother’s car with her mother driving and the kids in the back. Her mother had been babysitting them a lot around that time.

Suddenly a car pulled out in front of them and her mother touched the brakes and muttered “asshole”.

At which point the two boys in the back started laughing and saying Zole! Zole!

Fire engine madeleine

Some years ago, Ande, a friend of mine since childhood, sent me a snapshot of an ancient fire engine rusting in a snow-covered field of weeds.

You can see that the hood has been removed and the left front wheel as well; the black blob of the motor sits above the chassis. There is a windshield but no cab: a convertible fire engine! (What!?!) The machine’s fire-engine red paint is faded but proud. If you squint you can make out the words North Caldwell Fire Dept and the fire department’s emblem on the door.

You can’t see if there is a platform on the back where firefighters might have stood holding onto a handle like they do in old silent Mack Sennett movies.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” — L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

Yet I know that such a platform is there, because years go when dinosaurs walked the earth and I was a lad of fifteen I stood on the rear platform of that very truck en route to a brush fire on Mountain Avenue. Although I had been tagging along with my volunteer firefighter father to fires since I was ten years old, that was my first fire as an actual firefighter.

In 2023 there are laws that govern the admission of new members to volunteer fire departments. References are checked before you can become even a probationary firefighter. Lots of training is required before a new firefighter can do anything remotely dangerous. When you ride to a fire, you’re damn well wearing a seatbelt.

In 1968 my official induction into North Caldwell Fire Department went like this: “Hey Johnny, hop on the back. You’re gonna wear an Indian pack.”

Photo by Janet Jessel

It was April 6th, 1968, two days after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Madeleine science

A madeleine is a glorified cookie made famous by Marcel Proust in his seven-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu, in which the unnamed narrator, upon tasting a madeleine dipped in tea, experiences a flood of memories which take him a couple of thousand pages to document.

This photo reminds me of something. What is it? Wait, wait, don’t tell me! It’s almost there!

Proust’s La Recherche — known in English as Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time — is known not only for its length and its themes of manners and gossip and affairs, of nostalgia and the ineffability of memory, but also for its difficulty and sublime language. It’s a kind of Mt. Everest for pretentious literary types, something that such readers feel that they really should read some day — even though most of them never get around to making an attempt, and don’t make it very far if they do. It’s like a French Gravity’s Rainbow.

I, pretentious literary type that I am, own a copy of La Recherche. I special-ordered it when I was a grad student in agricultural economics at Purdue University more than 40 years ago. Since then I’ve read the first fifty or so pages. I’ll read the next few thousand pages someday. I just need to find a year or two when I have nothing better to do.

The phenomenon of people doing things like special-ordering La Recherche but then putting off reading it for 40+ years is studied by people who, for whatever reason, feel like making a scientific study of procrastination. I don’t understand them.

But getting back to that photo of the rusting fire truck in the snowy field: it’s kind of a madeleine for me, bringing back, as it does, so many memories of my North Caldwell boyhood. This phenomenon of some random stimulus evoking random associated memories is known as involuntary memory.

The science of involuntary memory is pretty interesting (as is the science of procrastination) but I’m not going to go into them now. Someday, who knows.

There’s much more where that came from

If you have heard of North Caldwell, you probably know of it as the place of residence of television mobster Tony Soprano. Tony’s North Caldwell is a lot different from the one I grew up in. Tony’s 1999 — 2007 North Caldwell is a prosperous suburban town, all houses and parks, but I grew up on a farm there in the 1950’s and 60’s with two cows and eight sheep and sixty chickens and peach and pear and plum and apple trees, and a big vegetable garden.

The real West Essex Regional High School, alma mater of the fictional Meadow Soprano (and where I went to 7th and 8th grades), was built on what had been the Sundman family farm which the borough of North Caldwell took by eminent domain for that purpose.

Some time after Ande sent me the fire truck photo (which was taken, who knows where or when, by his sister in law Janet), Ande happened to be driving down Grandview Avenue past the house I grew up in. It looked abandoned, and there were “No Trespassing” signs all about. It’s certainly not the kind of house you see in North Caldwell today, so it occurred to Ande that it was likely to be knocked down soon so that something more modern could be put in its place. So, Fred bless him, he stopped his car, took out his camera, proceeded to trespass all about the place, taking photos of the little house I used to live in, all abandoned and forlorn.

Sure enough a few days later the house was gone, and those three glorious trees — red maple, scarlet maple, blue spruce — that had been there since the 1950’s were gone too. Now there’s an anonymous mcmansion at that address, oh well. But Ande’s wonderful photos will provide plenty of grist for the figures it out memory mill, I can guaran-damn-tee you that. There will be stories, and they will ramify. They will ramify like Proust on steroids. So if you like that kind of thing, stay tuned.

Pro tip: don’t set your woods on fire

Here’s the beer mug that I inherited, along with my name and a predilection for firefighting, from my father.

I shouldn’t say ‘predilection’ in my father’s case. He just happened to set the pasture on fire one year when burning a year’s worth of random junk and the fire spread to the woods and the fire department had to be called and they came and put out the fire. But since the fire department was comprised of guys my father had grown up with they said, well, it looks like you’re one of us now, John, and so he was, for the next 23 years.

So that’s what a firefighter beer mug looks like. And here’s an Indian pack, like the one I wore & used to help tame a nasty brush fire on the ridge behind Mountain Avenue, North Caldwell, and Cedar Grove on the other side, April 6th, 1968.

Zoles abound but we won’t let them bring us down

I started writing this post thinking I was going to write about one particular zole, the zole who recently purchased Twitter and is busy turning it into a fascist hellsite and who moreover has recently thrown a monkey wrench into Twitter/Substack communication, which greatly inconveniences me.But really, who cares about that zole. Screw him.

And then I thought I might write something about the racist zole who told me that obscene “joke” about the assassination of Dr. King, only two days after the murder, as he — a man my father’s age — and I —I was 15 — stood on the back platform of a fire truck en route to put out a threatening brush fire.

But there again, what’s the point? The only reason it’s worth mentioning, if there is one, is that I grew up (as did my friend Ande) in a seriously anti-racist household and I, at 15, had never heard that kind of language or attitude before. My non-violent father would have slapped my face if he had repeated what that man said. That’s why it was so shocking and memorable.

But in retrospect I suppose it was well that I learned that day that that kind of stuff existed not so deeply hidden in my quaint little town, and from that day on I guess I became an official grownup in a couple of ways.

And in conclusion, por favor

If you’re looking for a pithy description of what Sundman figures it out! is all about as you share it with your friends you can just say Sundman figures it out! is an ongoing autobiographical episodic essay in the spirit of Montaigne, Marcus Aurelius, Emily Dickinson and Heloise, grounded in Sundman’s amazingly varied life experiences —farm kid, New York City boy, virtual African, Silicon Valley potentate, Martha’s Vineyard construction laborer not too proud to crawl on his belly like a reptile to insulate Carly Simon’s floor, and nanoscopically famous author of mindbending hackertastic philosopho-sexy novels of uncanny believability — sometimes adumbrated by ‘you are there!’ illustrations that are the artistic and historic equal of the Bayeux Tapestry —

Get me out of here!!

Or if not the equal, perhaps a close second?

You need to read the Scared firefighter up in the Bucket 3-post sequence to appreciate these sublime depictions of your humble substacker in mortal peril.