The area’s electric power went down. It was a valley-wide outage affecting all of our little city, along with several other small cities. Turned out to be a major transmission line failure. A crew went out and found and fixed it.
Electricity ceased about 11:24 AM. I was at my writing haunt, which is a locally known coffee shop. It was suddenly so quiet, and a little darker. “The power is out,” a barista exclaimed.
Only three customers were in the shop. One barista looked over at me and asked, “What did you do, Michael?”
I was innocent, of course. We were all told to leave. Turned out it wasn’t just that little corner of existence.
I drove home. All the traffic lights were out. People were handling it with courtesy and awareness in my part of town, but others later said they witnessed some flagrant driver idiocy. Takes all kinds, we agreed.
It’s weird how something like this can affect the day. Like, okay, power is out. I drove home. Clicked on the garage door opener to verify it didn’t work and parked in the driveway. Went in with a key to the side door. I was thinking what will I do with this time? Well, I can still write on the computer. I just won’t be on the net. Battery will last a while. Or I can dust furniture or cut the lawn.
A smoke detector was announcing that its battery was on low. So I located it, got out the small metal step ladder and took care of that. I remember my wife not wanting me to purchase those little steps. “Just use a chair,” she urged. But I figured we were adults and should have the proper tool for the job, so I paid the $40 for the stairs.
My wife then arrived home. She didn’t have any house keys, and I saw her trying to ring the doorbell. After I let her in, we wondered, what does work for us? Can we get texts and make phone calls? She had one text from the county telling about the outage. I called her. Her phone rang but we couldn’t connect.
So we sat and talked. Not like we don’t sit and talk every day but something new is always coming up. Then I get a text from my sister saying, “I see trump just screwed up again.”
I texted back, “what happened? We don’t have power.” But my text wouldn’t go. How could I receive a text but not send one?
Fifteen minutes later, the power was back on. It too much longer than the outage lasted to return to the rhythm of the day.
Michael Seidel, writer 