How to Breathe

Some calamities you live with. Some Calamities you live in.

Real-Time Air Quality June 4 - June 11

The air better today in New York but still bad, the air-quality-dashboard needle down out of lavender past red but caught in yellow. You can still detect the burning, though, under the shots of espresso being pulled on the corner, the washing of the sidewalk by a super up the block. A few days ago the sky was orange, not on fire but full of it, of ash. Everything orange but oddly cool. The radio says it’s because the air is so thick that sunlight can’t warm the earth like it should. Everything incongruous. We’ve got leftover pandemic masks, ones designed to filter stuff like this, but the mind inhales everything.

When I was in middle school, we had our house insulated with formaldehyde foam. I first knew of formaldehyde as what preserved the fetal pigs in the science-room specimen jars and what morticians pumped into bodies in the basement of the funeral home to make them look familiar. Being natural, plentiful, and versatile made formaldehyde a relatively inexpensive and popular insulation option for homes in the 1970s and early 1980s.

A fist of men arrived one day and stripped the siding from our house. They drilled hundreds of holes in the plywood skin, put on respirators, and shot foam into the walls. They left when the house looked new, covered in fresh cedar.

At first we thought we were just having a bad year — more colds than usual, the fatigue just from growing up, more school, and more sports. But I didn’t get better, and my cough became deeper, rougher, regular. Others noticed, too. My mother still talks about the day the band teacher sent home a note saying that I couldn’t move enough air to make the saxophone play a single note. Two doctors later confirmed that I’d lost about 40% of my lung capacity.

Breathing became so difficult that I was moved out of our house to a room in the New Grove Hotel, an old mansion converted into a dozen rented rooms. Sleeping on that high old bed, across from the school I was too sick to attend, my family on the other side of town still in our house, I would dream that water came in under the door, filling the room. I would watch the water’s surface reach the ceiling. I would hold what breath I could.

Later we (and everyone else) discovered that the formaldehyde off-gassed into the house and made us all sick, particularly my mother and me. The men came back, stripped the house back down to the studs looking for every bit of foam. My family (like everyone else) sued, and the company that sent the men went bankrupt. My breath slowly came back, but the body remembers hurt. When I cough, I still cough hard. 

After days of clear air in New York, the quality warnings reappear on the radio and social media, and we wake up to haze and the smell of Canada on fire a thousand miles away. The ash in the air sends me back to around the time when my breath started to return, when I was back sleeping in my own bed. I would help dad keep the insatiable fireplace fed — I loved the smell of a fire, still do, the practical effort of it that led to light and warmth, the most practical of things. But I also recall the feeling during that time of going to the alley for logs and thinking about all the ICBMs sleeved in their silos all around me with their fuses ready, and everything seeming like a match. 

I no longer dream about the room filling with water. What strikes me now about that time, more frequently these days now that I have my own kids looking for themselves in this broken world, is how my parents must have felt as they watched me lose my breath and realized it was from something they chose. What have I chosen? What have I done?

Some calamities you live with; others you live inside. Some calamities happen to you, and some you can draw a line, however faint, back to yourself. I don’t know. The mind is a thing made of handles, and sometimes the world pulls on all of them at once.