When time bends by the campfire

Sitting by a campfire sheds light on things — friendship, memory, life, death. Firelight unknots tension. Heat melts away stress. It had been years since I was warmed by an outdoor fire.

Rachel and I had been invited to this faló (Italian for bonfire) last week to celebrate the anniversary of the Edict of Emancipation of 1848 that gave Waldenses in northwestern Italy greater civil freedoms. It gave us an excuse to stay out late on a school night.

We brought wine. Our hosts served homemade gnocchi, shrimp cocktail, cheese, and soutissa. We ate in their dining room but were eager to retreat outside for the main event.

It was more a campfire than a bonfire, but it was a fire, nevertheless, that drew us in like light-starved moths.

Little girls delighted in burning the marshmallows on their sticks. Adults tried to coach them, Zen-like, to the perfectly toasted mallow. Ease it close to the fire, we said, but not into the flame. Tease the heat. Gently turn the mallow. Anticipate the flame. Become one with the pulsing coals. Don’t rush it, and so forth.

The girls thought we were lunatics. They preferred stabbing the marshmallows into the deepest part of the fire and watching them burst into balls of flame. They’d wave their sticks around, the incinerating marshmallow blazing blue like a comet sizzling through the sky.

I toasted mine as described above and expertly squeezed the molten glob between two graham crackers with a slab of Hershey chocolate in the middle. This is my definition of health food.

The adults chattered about life. They had known each other for much of their lives. Their kids were growing up together. They told stories, finished each other’s sentences, laughed, and broke into song at least once.

I warmed my feet at the fire until the soles of my shoes grew squishy like the chocolate in my s’mores.

It was a spring-like, clear night. A thin sliver of moon leaned on its back like a man flaked out in a zero-gravity recliner.

Mesmerized by the glow, I imagined my late father-in-law sitting here. He liked the outdoors and would enjoy flames warming his freckled face. He’d be thinking of his own childhood along the Platte River in Wyoming, of Huckleberry Mountain near Yellowstone.

Flames lit the faces of our hosts with flashing, golden light. On their faces I caught glimpses of my own circle of old friends. The fire illumined the path to a room called remember.

If my dad had been responsible for setting this fire, gasoline might have been involved. These docile flames would lick the sky.

Once I sat with my friends John and Mark by a propane fire on the deck of a condo in a Chicago suburb. It was a summer night. The next day we sailed on Lake Michigan. We convened a few months later at Mark’s church for his unexpected funeral. Sometimes you don’t see until you are momentarily blinded. The fire, the sailing, and the funeral each kindled their own kind of light.

My childhood friends appeared around that Valdese fire. I made out each face. They were all smiling.

Once, our eldest and I tended a fire in a smoker in the backyard. My younger sons collected pinecones, and Joseph and I threw them into the grill, which turned white in that atomic heat like a dumpster fire. Honestly, I have no idea what I was thinking. On most days, I was not a derelict father but on this one I was a mad scientist courting disaster. Vibrating with heat, the grill almost exploded when we aimed the garden hose on it. We were ecstatic.

When you’re at an evening campfire, you can study each other’s faces without being detected. Fire elicits delight. And delighted faces are hopeful faces. This fire ring made my heart sing, made everything groovy.

At a campfire, time bends. The living and dead make an appearance. It’s a thin space. The older I get, the more often I allow myself to drift into these transcendent worlds. With or without a campfire, the line between the real and surreal often blur.

The little girls incinerating marshmallows live only in the moment, laughing at the fireball at the end of their sticks. The teenagers with us are beginning to see there’s more to life than the present. They might be too close to their past to even notice it, but with high school graduations ticking closer, the future is beginning to scare them a little.

For most of us adults, time has a way of bunching up into one moment. We glimpse the whole spectrum of time. Age, if not wisdom, allows this perspective. How did the past unspool so quickly?

And what about the future? We know it’s just a blink away.

Follow the sparks from the fire. Watch them twist into the sky. The future, just beyond reach, is visible, rising fast like those sparks, shining bright, getting swallowed by a generous enormity.

And we aren’t far behind.