The little boy listened to his grandmother talking about the days when fire was still a novelty.
“And were you there when it was invented, Granny?” he cried out, all agog with wonder.
“Indeed I was,” she replied, smoothing his hair. “Indeed I was. It happened long ago, when I was very young.”
“Tell me about it,” begged the child.
And so she did.
She was a naked creature then, living on icy plateaus, alone. On that fateful day, she had toiled long and hard—oh, how hard and long she had toiled! But when the sun set, she could do no more. She lay down under the wind. Soon it became colder than could remember, and the numbness that is not sleep started in her toes and began to spread up her legs. And life condensed to a tiny ember within her.
Suddenly she saw another person crawling toward her out of the freezing gloom. He collapsed next to her; and they pressed their shaking bodies together.
Then…it was still cold, as cold as could be. By combining their twin embers, however, they managed to ignite a hair of dry grass, then a pitiful twig, and then a few more twigs, until finally they had managed to create a small campfire. Of course the campfire alone could never have kept them alive through that night. They still had to make use of each others’ deep interior fires, by huddling and clinging.
But the next day, they enlarged the campfire and warmed up enough to tackle the work yet to be done on the plateau: building storage sheds, houses, roads, fences: insulating all the dwellings, and making everything cozy, comfortable, and warm.
Until finally they didn’t need each other’s fire at all, so warm had it become everywhere. And everywhere, therefore, people quit tending their own internal fires—they no longer had any need of them—and all the little fires people carried inside themselves began to die.
“But to this very day,” the grandmother averred to her astonished little grandson, “that moment when Fire came into my life is my fondest, my most vivid memory.”
“But Granny,” exclaimed the child, “should I take care, then, not to let my own little fire go out?”
“Do as you wish,” his grandmother shrugged. “It’s your life.” And she turned away from the little fellow, then, to build up the fire, which had burned down somewhat during the storytelling.
