A Burning Question : Your House Is on Fire. Your Family Is Safely Out. You Can Take Just One Thing With You.

As a tireless non-professional supporter of UCLA, Barbara Rieber sits on a scholarship committee that screens the cream of freshman applicants.

In final face-to-face interviews, she asks the question, “If you had unlimited time, what would you most like to do?”

I suppose that, in the long run, an education should enlighten one’s leisure time more than it advances one’s career; and what students would do with their time may well determine whether they deserve scholarships.

From their answers, Mrs. Rieber guessed that the applicants had never before considered the question.

“Four of them said ‘travel; see new places; meet new people.’ One said ‘listen to music; explore myself.’ One said ‘study at Cambridge University.’ Two said ‘read and read and read.’ Three said ‘write.’ One (a girl) was going to write science fiction. Another (a boy) was going to do some creative cooking. One was going to ‘talk to people; learn.’ ”

Mrs. Rieber also asked another question: “You must evacuate your house immediately. All persons and pets are safely out. You can take one thing with you. What would it be? Why did you select it?”

Answers: “One would save her great-grandmother’s pearl necklace. One would take her diary. One would take a set of autographed books. One would take his portable computer. One would take his stereo. Four would take family photo albums.”

Living, as many of us do, in areas of almost constant fire hazard, we may have to face that decision ourselves.

I remember how often it came up several years ago during the disastrous Bel-Air fire, in which 400 homes were destroyed, many of them containing precious works of art.

There were stories of residents who ran back into flaming houses to save some photograph or other trifle. In panic, people’s sense of values seems to shatter. A woman will run back into a burning house to save a ball of string. A man may run back in to get that morning’s sports section.

Mostly, during the Bel-Air fire, residents stood in shock in the streets, dumbly trying to calculate the loss as all of their life’s treasures went up in smoke. Many people had to be restrained from running back into their doomed houses to search for some suddenly remembered object.

The only sensible answer to the question is “nothing.” Nothing is worth saving as long as there is any risk to life.

Although my wife and I have lived in the same house for 36 years, and it is stuffed to the ceiling with things that, for sentimental reasons, we cherish, there would be nothing worth running back in for if the house was on fire.

Still, in moments of terrible stress, sentiment may overcome common sense, and something of no monetary value may suddenly seem worth risking one’s life to save.

I thought about the letters I had written home to my wife from the Pacific during World War II. There must have been more than 100 of them. She has kept them all through the years in a shoe box, which at this moment rests on a shelf in my library.

I have never read them since coming home. I’ve always thought that maybe someday I would.

I know they were written in many moods. Loneliness. Fear. Resentment. Self-pity. Anger. Despair. Bravado. Some were written just before we left to go into combat. Some were written in the relief of survival. Some were written after I learned that our first child had been born.

I suppose the letters would reveal my callowness, my innocence, my chauvinism, my naivete. But there might also be something in them of the person I was to become, of the mature man--modest, generous, compassionate and wise.

At least they would be interesting. The intimate testament of a young man in war. Who could say? I might even put them into a book some day.

But would I go back into a burning house to save them? Not likely. We had a word in the Marine Corps for the one thing you saved first, and it wasn’t letters.

It occurred to me that my wife might treasure them more than I did. After all, they were addressed to her; they were the letters that had sustained her during her first pregnancy, when I was far away and she had no assurance that I would ever come home. They must have some deep and inerasable value to her. She might very well run back into a burning house to save them.

She was down by the pool reading. I went down and threw the question at her, casually.

“If the house was burning down and you could take one thing with you, what would it be?”

She shrugged. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Nothing?”

“I’d just save my skin, that’s all.”

I guess I’ll have to go back in for the letters myself.