Power loss may be no loss at all

When the power went off in the city the other night, it was as if a life force had been sucked from every room of the house and sent whooshing through the wall sockets and out into the wind and slashing rain.

The house grew instantly hushed and impenetrably dark. We each drew a breath and held it momentarily, trying to get our bearings in the velvety, disorientating blackness. My wife, who had been reading aloud to the children in bed, stopped in mid-sentence. I, who had been clipping my moustache, paused with the scissors near my nose. Unable to see my face in the mirror, I listened instead to the sudden silence.

The sounds that indicate a house running on full domestic power, both electrical and human, were absent. The refrigerator had stopped humming, the furnace had kicked out, the TV had quit yakking, and the washer sloshed once more and stopped. In those first few seconds of darkness, none of us said a word.

We seemed to be caught in a pleasantly unfamiliar vacuum. The children giggled and stumbled off the bed to look outside. The trees thrashed in silhouette and rain pelted the darkened houses up and down the street.

The four of us walked gingerly downstairs, touching the walls for guidance, and began rustling up candle stubs from the china closet. As the collection of flames began to flare, a soft yellow glow spread over the walls and across our faces. Soon, two adjoining rooms were decorated with flickering candlelight, giving the place a festive, cheery look.

We talked quietly about the pre-electric days when people carried oil lamps from room to room and were plunged into complete darkness just like this every night. Those “pioneer kids,” observed my son, had all the fun.

When the children were back in bed, my wife and I scrounged up some batteries for the radio and hunted for news of the blackout. We didn’t care much about the lights or the TV movie we were missing, but we were curious about when we might expect to get the furnace back. Twiddling the AM dial, we slogged through a sea of gabbling voices that faded in and out from along the east coast, each offering expert advice or a point of view.

A woman from Boston was advised about how to sue for her botched hysterectomy, and a battered wife in Connecticut learned about the route to “self-empowerment.” In New York, a man droned on about mutual funds. Another caller berated professional athletes for being “million-dollar crybabies” when he couldn’t even get a job to support his four kids.

The radio was cluttered with tales of despair and bitterness. We breezed past G. Gordon Liddy’s show — he was extremely angry about many things — and settled on a couple of guys doing a call-in show from New York. One of them was named Joe. In a thick New York Italian accent, he opened the show by ranting for several minutes about some neighborhood boys who had committed an unspeakable crime: the boys, who were about 8 years old, had pushed Joe’s 5-year-old daughter off her bicycle.

Joe said he was furious when he found out. He ran out of the house and chased the boys down the street, cornering two of them. He screamed in their faces, and even threatened to “end their lives” if they touched his daughter again. Joe, as he told us listeners over and over for emphasis, “put duh fear a God in dem punks.”

Joe boiled over as he told his tale of urban moral decay. Soon he was practically screeching over the airwaves about 10-year-olds who kill toddlers in England, 13-year-olds who stomp homeless people to death in France, and 8-year-old “scum” who push defenseless kids off bikes in New York. They were all the same to Joe at that moment — murderers and bullies — and he was sick of every one of them. He talked about “fryin” the “little murderin’ creeps” in “small chairs” so they won’t grow up to be big criminals.

“But dose punks won’t bother my dawtuh again, I can tellya dat,” he assured the radio audience. “What dey do to my dawtuh dey do to me, and when dey deal wit me dey take their chances.”

The man’s rantings began to sicken me; he appeared to be choking on his anger. I wondered how a grown man could be spurred into talking about electrocuting children — children the same age as my own, asleep upstairs — because his daughter had been pushed off a bike. What had the city done to this man’s reason, and were there others like him? When a few listeners called to support Joe, and to relate similarly hostile tales of their own, I flicked off the dial and left New York far behind.

For the next few minutes, we stared at the beautiful constellation of candles on the table and said little. Outside, the wind moaned and the trees shivered. All was peaceful again. The news of the world could wait until tomorrow.