Pondering the outcome

What did it last? Thirty seconds?
It was Friday morning. Trash day at our house.
I’d already hauled the recyclables to the street. Connie was taking some trash to the curb.
Usually, that’s a pretty typical division of labor at our house, not one of those, “You cook dinner and I’ll eat it” exchanges. But in the endless process of cleaning out the garage, she had more than usual to deal with.
So I was sitting alone at the kitchen table when it happened.
The lights went out.
And not only did the lights go out, the fan and the air conditioner stopped.
It was about 7:20 a.m., but already the mercury was climbing. Sweat glistened on my arms from minimal exertion. I was trying to cool down.
And suddenly, the refrigerator stopped humming.
It was as if time had stood still.
My agenda was immediately full of questions: Should I open windows, hoping to catch a breeze? How are we going to put a paper out without electricity? We’d dealt with the ice storm of 2005, but this seemed a more complicated challenge.
At least in terms of comfort.
I felt July crawling over me within seconds of the power failure.
And still the questions piled up: If we found a generator that could handle the needs of the newspaper press, could the web of newsprint handle the craziness of the humidity? Paper hates humidity, and it can get ornery running through a web press.
If we found a small generator that handled the newsroom’s needs for its computers, what would the impact of the heat produced by those computers be on the already insufferable conditions?
How would our computer system respond to the blackout? Would we bounce back quickly or spend half the day troubleshooting little glitches?
If power were out for most of the county, what would the impact be on local government and local businesses? Already potential stories were forming themselves as subsets of questions in my mind.
And, on a more personal level, I wondered if I should I go back upstairs and change into shorts.
I sat, and I sweated, and I tallied up questions as I ate my healthy breakfast of Fiber One and blueberries, sipped my V-8, and avoided my coffee because I was already uncomfortable.
And then, just as mysteriously as it had failed, power was restored.
The refrigerator and the air conditioner kicked back in, so did the fan in the living room. The lights came on, like cartoon ideas above my head.
And I took a deep breath and realized my day had become much simpler.
The power was on. The room was cooling. And putting out a paper was much less of an adventure.
Two seconds later, Connie came through the back door, having dumped the trash in its proper spot for pick-up.
“You missed all the excitement,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Well,” I said, “you really had to be here.”[[In-content Ad]]