In contemplation of a new Christmas, I offer a true tale of redemption and hope.
When I was a boy, my mother owned a white MGB convertible. It looked like a bullet carved out of cream cheese, sounded like an earthquake and moved like a cheetah when she put it through its paces on Commonwealth Avenue. She was a law student at the time, and the inside of the car looked like a bomb went off in a courtroom: papers everywhere, legal textbooks stacked on the floor, yellow legal pads overflowing with outlines crowding the trunk. It was her favorite thing.
Late one night, a Boston College student suffering from severe emotional and addiction issues came walking down our street with a can of gasoline and a pack of matches, looking for a place to die. He found my mother’s car sitting unlocked in the driveway, let himself in, and closed the door. He covered himself with the tweed coat she had left on the passenger seat, poured the gas, and popped a match. I woke that night to the sound of engines and the sight of red lights heliographing across my ceiling. Every fire truck in the world was in front of my house. The MGB was on fire from bumper to bumper in the driveway. Three firefighters were holding up the back end while a fourth put the hose to the gas tank. They beat the flames back eventually, and it sat there on four melted tires hissing like a scalded cat. My mother’s favorite thing looked like something that had fallen from space.
One of the firefighters pried open the door. The car was empty. Well, almost empty.
Inside was a massacre of paper: Books incinerated, legal pads soaked beyond recognition, everything destroyed. This was a multi-tiered disaster because my mother’s law school finals were right around the corner. A law student without outlines is a chef without a kitchen. The only things to survive the conflagration were a slightly charred book on torts and her stout old Black’s Law Dictionary. Eventually, they hauled it away, leaving only a black scorch mark on the…