Power failure

We had a power failure about a week ago … actually pretty close, as it happened last Friday evening, and this won't post till Friday morning (though I'm writing it Thursday night).  And I made a note to myself to write you about it, though I'm no longer sure exactly why.  But here goes.

Last Friday was the day when I was slated to drive the boys to Wife's place.  In fact I drove Son 2, but not Son 1: he had been invited to a Saturday birthday party by the guy who will be his new roommate at college in the fall (they met on Facebook, of course), and Wife had given permission for him to go.  The thing is that getting there meant a train ride of several hours, and the train doesn't stop in Wife's town.  So Son 1 stayed with me one more night and then left first thing Saturday morning.  But he came along for the ride when I delivered Son 2.

On the way back to my place, I decided to stop off downtown.  It's summer, and it was a nice evening … and the city had decided to show silent movies for free in the town square.  So we grabbed some burgers, found parking, and then wandered over to find a place to sit.

Of course the movie started late: someone had to say "a few words" first, in gratitude to all the people who had made this showing possible.  And he offered an excellent lesson-by-example for why you should always prepare your public remarks ahead of time and speak from notes.  Very few people can extemporize and stay pithy, and … well, … he wasn't one of them.  Then when the film finally started rolling, we got advertisements from local merchants who had contributed to pay for the show.  So it was a good 15 or 20 minutes after the advertised starting time that Harold Lloyd's "The Freshman" finally started to roll.

Son 1 had been expressing reservations about this plan for a while.  Why would anybody want to watch a comedy from the 1920's?  It was going to be dumb, he just knew it.  He'd give it a chance, but he was sure that pretty soon he'd be asking me for the keys to my apartment, and he'd walk home if I insisted on watching the whole thing.  Except that once it started, he was laughing as much as I was.  Neither of us had seen the movie before; and while it telegraphs all the jokes, they are still funny.  Son 1 murmured to me, "My God, it's so full of all these movie clichés! Only I bet when they made this, they weren't clichés because every cliché has to start somewhere and this was probably it."

So we sat there, wrapped up in the ever-more-outrageous story that Harold Lloyd acted out with such earnestness, until all of a sudden – maybe twenty minutes from the end – the projector went dead.  There were the normal cries of "Ohhhhh…" until people realized that the whole city block had gone dark.  As had the next block.  There were lights way over that-a-way, but none nearby.

What to do?  Nobody made any announcements, neither that they would start up again in a minute nor that the show was over.  The audience began to drift away.  I insisted on waiting around for ten or fifteen minutes (while Son 1 got ever more impatient), and then conceded that yes, we might as well go home.  So we walked back to our car and drove home.

My apartment was dark too.  Actually so was my whole city block, and all the adjacent blocks.  The street lights seemed to be working, and in our trip from downtown to home we had passed areas that were lit up.  So I'm not sure quite how to account for the differences between those areas that were dark and those that were light.  Obviously all the dark ones must have been on a common circuit, but then who would have laid out the city's grid so that such an oddly-gerrymandered area was all on one circuit?  It didn't make a lot of sense.

Once we were home, Son 1 proposed a walk around the block to try to reconnoiter just how far the darkness stretched.  Then we lit some candles, settled down, and talked.  Normally Son 1 would have been playing computer games all evening, while Son 2 listened to music.  But Son 2 wasn't there, and Son 1 had left his computer unplugged all day so it had very little charge … and now of course he couldn't plug it in.  So talking was about all we had left.  I don't actually remember what we talked about, because none of it was earth-shaking … but I remember that it was the kind of relaxed-but-kinda-serious conversation that I find I can have pretty naturally with either boy so long as the other one isn't there.  It's interesting: when the two of them are together, each picks up an energy from the other that steers our conversation more towards jokes or silliness … or towards cutting me out of it completely while the two of them retreat into discussing things I know nothing about.  With either one alone, though, I find we can talk easily and relaxedly about subjects that interest me as well as them.  I guess that dynamic doesn't surprise me, but I've noticed it.

After a while we both went to bed.  In the morning the power was back on.  We had breakfast, and I delivered Son 1 to the train station.  Then I had time to myself – finally! -- and settled into a weekend of doing not very much ….