Since I started working on Merry-Go-Round last August, I’ve been sticking more or less to the same morning routine: shut off alarm (which goes off between 4 and 5am); stagger into the bathroom — the path illuminated, faintly, by a night light; slip back into the bedroom (carefully, mustn’t awaken The slumbering Missus); grope around on my nightstand for glasses and hearing aid and the stretchy thingum I use to keep my hair out of my eyes; stoop down to pick up the lap desk and current reading material and (usually) Merry-Go-Round excerpt I’m working on at the time; tiptoe out of the bedroom; proceed to kitchen to heat up hot water for tea; etc.
This morning, things didn’t quite work out that way. This morning, just as I returned from the bathroom to the nightstand, the power went off. I couldn’t see a thing. Total blackness. Burgeoning panic.
Actually, for a split-second, I didn’t believe the lights had gone out. I thought my hair had fallen over my eyes. I reached up to push it out of the way and — yep! — there were the red digits on the alarm clock. (My alarm clock has a battery backup, so they weren’t flashing red but normal.) The night-lighted route to the bathroom was again illuminated. Whew. I picked up my glasses, and bent down to get the stuff off the floor. I reached for the hearing aid with my free hand.
And then the power went off for real.
I pushed my hair back once, twice more. Total 100% blackness. I was afraid to move, lest the stuff in my hands fall in a clatter to the floor. (Which I wouldn’t hear, of course, but The Missus probably would.)
This was where the panic really started to bubble. Our neighborhood recently instituted one of those Crime Watch programs, so of course we’ve gotten our share of scare stories about home invasions and marauding gangs and so on. And we’re always worried (with good reason, I should add) about the tall and very old trees which surround our house. Had we been invaded? Had a tree fallen on the house? Was The Missus even then crying out for me?
This was the old Wait Until Dark movie exponentiated, because I couldn’t even hear anything. There were no candles nearby, or if there were I couldn’t find them, and even then I’d have to search for matches, too (which, I’m certain, are nowhere near what candles we do have). The nearest battery-powered light source I could think of was the fluorescent Coleman camping lamp I use when grilling after sunset — which was in the kitchen, at the other end of the house. Maybe I should just go back to bed…
But no. Cursing the darkness, wishing I could light a candle but cursing the candles a little, too, I inched towards where I thought the bedroom door might be.
Yes, inched. The only way “to inch” accurately describes movement, you know, is if the incher is barefoot (which I was) or in some kind of muffled footwear. Furthermore, the incher’s feet have to remain on the floor, and he has to baby-step shuffle — yes, again — no more than an inch or two at a time.
Eventually (I figured it must have taken about 10 minutes; our bedroom isn’t that big, but it was still a lot of inches to traverse) I reached the door. I exited the bedroom, to the hallway.
Meanwhile, my brain continued to flood my system with whatever chemical or hormone inspires immobilizing panic. (And don’t tell me it’s adrenalin — that makes you want to act, and my whole being wanted nothing more than to stand still.) I was still shuffling down the hall; we have cats, and I knew lifting my feet in the dark would invite disaster. But at least I was no longer inching. I was footing…
There’s no point in dragging this out. I did manage to foot my way to the kitchen and find the Coleman lamp. (There was another flicker of panic just before I turned the switch, not sure what the light would reveal. Did I really want to see the hatchet descending?) I carried it with me up the hall, put it on the carpet outside the bedroom door, slipped back inside long enough for my eyes to adjust so I could make my dim way to the nightstand and the hearing aid. Threw on a pair of jeans and some socks. And went forth from the bedroom, shutting the door behind me, to greet an hour of powerlessness.
When I used my cell phone to report an outage to the electric company, the guy told me they’d already fielded five other calls about power failures in that general area. (He first asked if I’d heard any loud noises when the lights went out. I just laughed.) So I was pretty sure then that it would be okay to go into rooms where the doors were shut. No invasion. And no downed tree, either. Most importantly, no screaming Missus.
Total elapsed time, from the moment I shut off the alarm clock to the time I beeped my cell phone off: twelve minutes.
There was one funny moment, right after I turned the Coleman on and started back across the living room. The two cats, who normally want nothing to do with each other, were seated fairly close together on the living-room floor. Their heads were turned toward me. And they were, naturally, staring at me as though I’d lost my mind. Easy for you to say, I thought to them, you and your magic dark-seeing eyes. They blinked, slowly, acknowledging the thought, and then went back to conspiring in silence.
Update, later the same day: The Missus tells me she woke up the moment the power went off: she uses a “noise machine” to help her sleep, and when that shuts off she wakes up. (Kind of a reverse alarm clock.) She never was able to get back to sleep, either. So all my precautions were for naught.
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