Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Power Outage

Because of my white night on Sunday, I went to bed early last night, hoping for a long and restful sleep.  When I pressed the start button on my recorded book, I only heard about a paragraph, so apparently I went right to sleep.  But then I woke at about three a.m.  Something woke me, perhaps a distant crash, or something, but as I opened my eyes, I saw the flashing lights on my clock radio, so I knew that the power was out a split second before I saw the sudden pale blue elctrical-looking flash that spread out horizontally before vanishing again.  Probably some drunken resident driving into a power pole.  And then silence fell.  I lay and listened to it with enjoyment.  No sounds of the woman downstairs and her all-night-movie.  No buzzing of the clock-radio.  No humming of the refrigerator.  Not a sound.  But not the absence of sound one gets from the fingers in the ears (although that always magnifies the interior sounds) but just a pleasant quiet so that the movement of tree branches and the drip of occasional raindrops could be clearly discerned.

I thought about getting up and taking a picture off the deck, since the enormous Pietro's Pizza sign and the bowling alley sign, as well as all the other neon signs that keep the area beyond the trees lit all night, would be off.  But I realized something before I got up, and that is, that to take pictures, you need light.  Makes it hard to document the way things look without it.  So I got up and went to the bathroom, and then got back into my soft warm bed, in my cool and quiet room, and went to sleep.

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