Mom’s the Word column: When the news is not good, a moment of grace amid the wildfires
Little treasures. Sylvia Warwick was thinking of them as she sat on a gray, metal chair at the Pasadena Convention Center the morning the Eaton Fire forced her and her son from the home they have loved since 1971.
Warwick, 87, and her son 65-year-old son Kevin had grabbed some paperwork, warm clothes, a flashlight, and her cellphone (Kevin doesn’t own one, he doesn’t like those things.) They drove to the parking lot of a Stater Brothers until police told them the fire was coming near. They stopped at the parking lot of Trader Joe’s before deciding to head to the Pasadena Convention Center, an evacuation center where they had a hamburger dinner.
“I’m impressed because everyone is getting along, and the dogs are behaving,” Warwick said in her lilting voice, traces of her English birth in her enunciation. “We’ll be all right.”
Warwick met her husband Loftus in Australia. He was from Scotland, but she teasingly says she overlooked that. Together, they decided to emigrate to America, settling in Altadena in the late 1950s. Their first home was a Craftsman previously owned by F.G. Runyon, editor of the Pasadena Evening Post.
Loftus– “we called him Sandy because he had red hair” — worked as a house painter. Sylvia worked in antiques. By the time they had their three children, they had moved to their beloved Spanish-style home on Braeburn Road. After 37 years of marriage, Sandy passed away.
“His family didn’t like it when they found out I was English,” Sylvia said. “But we worked on it. You just roll with it, don’t you?”
Kevin, who inherited not only his father’s red hair, but also his profession, was born and raised in Altadena, He said he loves his hometown most for the sense of peace it offered, “all the gardens, just walking around, you’ll see beautiful gardens.”
By the time Warwick received the evacuation warning on her phone, she could see the Eaton fire out her window.
“It was blowing sparks from the fire landing in people’s front yards,” she said. “Very frightening.”
She spent the hours in evacuation praying, and fretting a bit about the things she’d left behind.
“All I have are little treasures,” she said.
A large, antique plate depicting the Marquis de Lafayette’s landing in Manhattan, had a place of honor on a cupboard.
“I should have picked it up,” she tells her son, taking his hand.
I haven’t heard back from her and will keep checking in.
But the afternoon I met the Warwicks, photographer Will Lester captured hard-to-believe scenes of destruction and conflagration …. on Braeburn Road.
So I think of Sylvia and how in a generous minute, she showed me the kind of brave I want to be.