The Night the Lights Went Out On My Block….

My mostly uneventful weekend ended with a bang on Sunday evening, or to be more accurate a loud “boom!” and huge electrical sparks. I had just returned home from a nice neighborhood walk, during which there was some band playing in someone’s backyard up the street, they were pretty good, but I couldn’t see anything through the hedges…anyway, when I got home I turned on the TV because “Alternative” hour was playing on VH1 Classic. I absolutely love that show—it’s a total flashback from the old days of MTV’s “120 Minutes.” They were showing some really good videos, so I was attempting to transfer some of them from the DVR (sort of like a TiVO) onto a DVD, when suddenly I heard a loud boom and saw enormous sparks shooting from the power line outside the window. In a split second, all of the power had gone out on my block. It crossed my mind for a moment that perhaps the gods were punishing me for owning too many fancy electronic gadgets.

Outside on the street, I noticed a group of people had gathered around a dead squirrel which had evidently been the cause of the electrical outage. Immediately on the scene was Fat, Shirtless, Loud Man who lives across the road (I call him “Fat, Shirtless, Loud Man” because he’s rather fat, and he always seems to always be outside without a shirt, and yelling out things to his wife, kids or one of the neighbors. Also, he’s been trying to sell his house for about 2 ½ years, so I keep hoping he’ll eventually move…but the guy seems unable to sell his house…Won’t somebody please come and buy this loud bastard’s house!?) Anyway, he was calling out disgusting things about the dead squirrel like, “He’s well-done now…come and get it while it’s hot!” This is when I decided to go back inside. Meanwhile, neighborhood kids (and their parents for that matter) seemed to just be hanging out on the sidewalk next to the dead squirrel, like some kind of meeting of the minds to try and figure out what to do. Fat, Shirtless, Loud Man had already called the power company, but late on Sunday evening, you can’t expect anyone to come rushing to make a repair.

For a while, I was considering getting in the car and driving off somewhere. My husband wasn’t home, and I thought I’d get bored pretty quickly. But then I decided, no problem…I can survive a couple of hours without electricity…What to do?…Well, I thought, I’ll just sit on the porch and listen to some music. I just need to find a battery-powered CD player somewhere. So I looked around, and finally I found a Discman I’d bought about 15 years ago. Then I looked around in the miscellaneous kitchen drawer for some batteries, but none of them would make that thing run. So I thought, maybe that Discman is just broken… I think I have a cassette player somewhere, and some cassettes. It was starting to get kind of dark inside the house, but I managed to find a 20 year-old Walkman and a cassette tape of Crowded House…but that thing wouldn’t run either. (I know it worked about five years ago, because I recalled taking it to a Supergrass concert to record the show. It was actually my husband’s idea, but somehow he’d talked me into being the one to sneak it into the club because he thought the guards would be less likely to search a female. Well, as it turned out, there was a female security guard who decided to go through my purse, which was very tiny and really only big enough to hold a small wallet. She even made me open my lipstick case and demonstrate that it was real lipstick in there! I'm sure she was mostly just looking for drugs, but she wouldn't have allowed me to bring a recording device inside. Anyway, the whole time I had the Walkman wrapped inside my jacket, which was tucked under my arm. She didn’t think to check there!)

Anyway, then it was starting to get really dark, and I looked around for a flashlight. I found three of them in the drawer, but, of course, not one of them was functioning. No worries, I thought, I have candles… dozens of candles! I spent the next 20 minutes walking around the house lighting various candles in various rooms. Then, as I sat in my luminous house wondering what to do next, I realized that I was starting to get sort of a headache from the combined aroma of numerous scented candles, so I decided to wait outside on the front porch for the lights to come back on, and for my husband to return home. The electricity did eventually come back on, just a few minutes before my husband came home, but in the meantime I got to thinking about the fact that I am in no way prepared for any sort of emergency or electrical blackout, and I really should make sure I have some sort of a surge protector for all of those electronic gadgets.