Dropped Baby
Dropped Baby
By David Daniel
If you were around forty years ago you may remember the story.
A fire in a triple-decker tenement in Lowell, Massachusetts, on a December night so cold that the hydrants froze and firefighters had to use blow torches to open them. It was all over the papers and the TV news, even went national for a week or so around the holidays. In USA Today. TRIUMPH AMID TRAGEDY. Someone dropped an infant out of the burning building—“I just acted, instinct”—and three floors down someone caught her—“What else was I going to do? Anyone would.” Just ordinary people, doing extraordinary things.
In real ways the incident shaped the child’s life. In the short term, sure. Baby Jilly (as the media called her) was a cute face smiling from the tiny halftone dots of newsprint and pixels of television screens. She was featured in Life magazine. The larger context got lost: a mother burned to death, a father in the Air Force, ill-equipped to raise a young child. Parenting duties went to distant relatives in Duluth (later Spokane, and eventually Central Falls, Rhode Island).
But even the most miraculous stories, like the most bleakly tragic, pass into time and forgetting. Though not always for the protagonists. The celebrity culture can suspend people in the roles they played in a brief drama long after the footlights go down.
Baby Jilly grew up. Jillian went to high school, danced at her senior prom (where she was 2nd-runner up queen). Jill worked to find her way in life. There were men who’d been affected by the original story, and were inspired (or driven) to try, years later, to be her rescuer—not difficult to do in the internet age—though those connections tend to be built of the merest strands of imagination, as ephemeral as two seconds of free fall through an icy winter night.
But here, almost four decades on, I think of the tenderness with which nameless citizens came together to rescue me. I believe my mother, God rest her soul, is grateful. I’m sure my father and relatives would have thanked everyone who helped save the child.
I’ve lived in nine states, have been married and divorced three times. I work in an animal shelter and, recently, earned certification as a phlebotomist. As I reflect on my life so far, I guess I have trusted everyone who’s ever shown me affection. My trust hasn’t always been well placed. But I’m okay.
I remain hopeful.
I think I still want to be caught.
Only Dave Daniel would dare drop a baby into the jaws of life in Lowell and searching a lifetime for her soul.
I can’t wait for his sequel. When a man seeks a new best friend at a dog shelter, he soon finds out he’ll also have his hands full with Jillian.
I was following what I thought was a fastball that turned into a curveball. Dave D., the literary pitcher of stories that could only fly home from the unique angle of that arm.
This is the first curveball like this I remember from D.D., the narrator curveball.
What “Tim Coats” says. What a gem of a story.
Born in 1945, I often say I was dropped the same year as the Atomic Bomb. But concur with Jilly here, still hopeful and glad to have been caught…by all those hands.