The Blue Thermos

Every time Barry Nadar came to the classroom he brought a blue thermos bottle with him. He didn't need one because the facility always made hot coffee, tea, cocoa, and water available. I never saw Mr. Screener open the bottle, fill it, empty it, or wash it: it just sat on the table. It was obvious that the thermos wasn't being used as athermosbut as a form of security. I wondered if it carried any significance from the man's past.

I noticed that when Mr. Nadar was not in the classroom still he never let the bottle out of his sight. The fixation made me wish that I were clairvoyant so I could see why the thermos meant so much to him. It wasn't until after the east wing of the facility burned down that I learned the secret of the bottle.

The whole thing --- the fire, the deaths, Barry rushing into the flames to rescue the only thing he held dear --- were something out of a 1930's movie. The windwaswhistling, there wasreallightning in the sky, the lightsdidgo out, and eerie screams definitely emanated from the home of our forty, mentally diseased individuals. Then the cry, fire! And Staff, Med Aides, Program Managers, Administrators hustled the benumbed Residents from the building. Many were in wheel chairs, most didn't know what the commotion was about, many sauntered the wrong way as if they were going to dinner, Juice Break, or an unscheduled Outing.

But when the flames shot through the windows and the smell of burning

shingle-tar filled the air, more than one Resident panicked. One of them was Barry Screener. Because in the hurly-burly of vacating the premises immediately, he had left the treasured blue thermos behind.

We've heard how a man under great stress, his adrenaline pumping like a fire hose, can lift a car single handedly, or how people are driven to act so heroically they make the ancient Greeks look like Boy Scouts. So it was when Barry Nadar entered the fire, a wall of blazing hell so great a Hollywood stunt man in an asbestos suit wouldn't think of entering it.

Not surprisingly, neither Barry nor the blue thermos came out alive. The heat was so intense it melted the steel beams and the roof collapsed like a wet, limpy cardboard box. When the firemen poked around the ashes, they found a man crouched in the fetal position, embracing a cylindrical metal object. I thought, my God, why was that thermos so valuable that a man gave his life for it? When I made up the reports and entered them in the Resident's Permanent Files I finally found out why. For I glanced at the other notes on Barry Nadar. Especially the one entered twenty years earlier that explained why the man was committed to Sugar Loaf.

The report stated that when Barry was thirteen, a fire broke out in his family home. His mother, whom he loved dearly, had dashed into the burning house. She threw things out the window wildly. As any movie-goer might guess, one of the items was a half-gallon, Stanley, stainless steel, blue thermos. The incident scarred the boy psychologically, so much so that soon after the funeral he was committed to the Health Center indefinitely. Though he didn't say it in words, everyone knew that the man would never let go of the bottle, that he would die first.

The longer I stayed at Sugar Loaf the more I came to realize that sometimes fact is more fanciful than fiction. I doubt if any writer could

create a greater love for one's mother, a stronger bond with a thermos bottle, two horrendous deaths by fire, and a boy who would rather die than lose everything a second time.