By Sue Fagalde Lick
Black. I was going through the book pile, trying to decide which one to read next as the KQED pledge break blasted from the living room, when everything went black. No click, no crunch, no boom, just sudden silence as the lights went out. So much for my plans to dash back out for another dose of Peter, Paul and Mary, then fold the laundry and read a little before bed. My home office was blindingly black. Now, where is that flashlight, I thought.
A glimmer of twilight showed from the open front door. I instinctively headed that way, taking the dog with me. My husband, facing a blank computer screen, followed. Our neighbors were doing the same thing, congregating on the sidewalk.
Instant block party. Neighbors who had never talked to each other before were laughing together, sharing their life stories. We were in pajamas or shorts, barefoot, uncombed, sweaty. It didn't matter; we couldn't see each other anyway.
"I was watching a great movie on TV," a child whined, but she was soon hugging our dog, who was delighted to meet all these new people.
Several of the neighbors hadn't eaten dinner yet and didn't know what to do without their microwaves. After an hour or so, they got into their cars and drove off to look for an open restaurant.
The rest of us remained, waiting for the full moon to come up, debating over the constellations--"Is that the Little Dipper?" "That isn't Venus, it's an airplane,"--and wondering how we would get up in the morning without our clock radios.
The dog and I walked a bit and discovered lights in the streets circling our island of darkness. Radio news reports mentioned nothing about the outage, just bemoaned the extreme heat and smog.
Guilty thoughts of using the air conditioner, the computer, and the television all at once drifted through my mind. Multiply our house by hundreds of thousands of others in the valley, and Mr. Electricity just couldn't handle the demand. The outage showed us what our neighborhood really looks like at 10 p.m.
My husband and I planted patio chairs in the front yard and watched the world go by in shadowy shapes and flickering flashlights. It was dark and peaceful. Just like camping. All we needed was cheap wine and folk songs around a campfire.
We were still prowling around at midnight when the lights went back on. "Yahoo!" shouted the next-door neighbor. "Hooray," I thought, but with a tinge of regret for that dark, quiet world where the electrical cords that tie us to our televisions, computers and microwave ovens go slack and we emerge from our houses to talk and relax. Suddenly we need each other more than we need our machines.
Earthquakes, fires and floods bring people together, too, but this way nobody gets hurt. Black is the color of peace.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, June 19, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved