Outage Outing

Yesterday afternoon Adam came to me and said, "I think the power's out." I hadn't noticed, but I flipped some switches and he was right: no electricity.

It's been a while since we've had a power outage that lasted more than a few minutes. In fact, if I'm remembering correctly, the last one was over three years ago. It was in the late fall, and when the lights went out in the early afternoon I assumed they'd be back on before dark. But as darkness started to move in quickly, I realized we needed to prepare for the possibility of a cold, dark night.

I gave my children a few assignments: "Gather blankets from downstairs; we'll all sleep upstairs tonight. Someone help me put together some food we can eat while we can still see. Ben, go get my basket of candles and bring them in here."

Ben was thirteen, and incredulous at my request. "Mom," he said. "The power is out. It's starting to get dark. This is no time to worry about how the house smells."

Okay, it's possible I have too many scented candles.


But I digress. Back to yesterday . . .

It was a very hot and humid day, and without our swamp cooler and fans the house quickly became suffocating. I stepped outside to find that it was even less bearable there. All the drivers in the family were gone. We had no television or computers to distract us, and our phone wasn't working. The sun was setting, and it was getting hard even to read. My plans to do some laundry, make dinner, and write a little were shot.

I finally found a cell phone and asked my daughter to text her dad at work. Power's out, she wrote. Call this phone. I realized that with my hearing loss, I probably wouldn't hear the phone if he called it, so I sat down on the couch, tucked the cell phone just under my leg, and tried to wait patiently.

And then the couch started shaking.

I was near panic. What's going on here? I thought. The power's off and now we're having an earthquake!"

I'm sure that some of you have guessed that the phone I was sitting on was set to vibrate. When I finally figured that out, I had the privilege of spending several fumbling seconds trying to figure out how to answer the phone. But eventually I hit some random button and the phone stopped shaking. Hurray! I could make human contact!

I told my dear Wes how miserable we were. "Okay," he said, "I'll come home and rescue you."

And he did. Fifteen minutes later we were sitting in an air-conditioned van on our way to a pizza restaurant. Peace and comfort had been restored.

At the pizzeria, we made the uncharacteristic choice to splurge a bit. (Since eating out with our family is an uncharacteristic splurge in itself, it didn't seem quite so weird to continue the madness.)

We ordered a something that this restaurant offers mostly as a novelty: the 36-inch pizza.

It's a lot of pizza. It completely covered the table, so we put our plates on our laps. And there's a contest connected to this monstrosity: if two people can finish it off in an hour, they win a prize. (And the prize is: lots more pizza! And maybe barf bags, I don't know . . .) We didn't eat it all, but we put quite a big dent in it. And we laughed and talked and shared.

It was still hot outside when we left the restaurant, and we didn't know if our power was back on, so we went to the library to check out some books and movies and to enjoy their air conditioning, When the library closed at nine, we decided to go home.

The road was dark. No street lights, no house lights, no porch lights. We saw our neighbors sitting outside, waving paper fans across their faces. Clearly, the electricity was still off.

We pulled into our dark garage and began to feel our way into the house. Adam got there first and opened the door. Then, just as he stepped inside, the kitchen lit up. It was like magic.

And now we can return to our distraction-filled, speedily-moving electronic lives, with perhaps a little more appreciation for the electricity that makes it possible.

As we got ready for bed, I mentioned to Wes that I was getting frustrated with my computer, which we bought used last year. I haven't wanted to complain about it, because, while we always have enough money to get along, we don't usually have of lot left over for luxuries. But, I told him, the computer is becoming increasingly unstable and unreliable, and I haven't felt like I can get anything done on it.

We realized as we talked that we had just spent twice as much money on pizza as we spent to buy the computer. (It was a twenty-five dollar computer.)

"That's okay," I said."We weren't really buying pizza."

He nodded and we smiled. Nothing more needed to be said. We both knew that we were buying memories.

And here I sit, typing up the whole story on my sad little computer, which has been on for two hours now and is still running happily.  So I can still find reasons to believe in little miracles.

And hey, if anyone out there wants leftover pizza, there's some in my refrigerator.