Sunday morning blackout
August 19, 2003 ~ 4:43 p.m.
LONDON, U.K.�Talk about a way to make my last morning at home very interesting.
At 4 a.m. Sunday morning, I was in that sort of lucid phase of sleep�that tenuous stage between sleep and consciousness�when I heard a noise I can�t really describe. When you�re just about to doze off, sounds tend to be amplified and scarier. I was jolted into full consciousness, just as the fans switched off and the nightlight in the hallway winked out. Even the streetlights went dead. All was dark and silent. Then I heard another, very eerie noise, a sort of cranking sound followed by a deep electric whine. Then all was silent once more.
�What the hell�s all this?� I whispered aloud to myself.
My first thought was that the same power outages that had affected New York had trickled east across New England and into Boston. On the day I was scheduled to fly back to London, this was all I needed.
As I was now awake and there was nothing better to do, I threw on some shorts and my sneakers and went for a run. I saw the siren lights of police cars flashing at the end of our side street, on the main boulevard. I began running and after a quarter of a mile, I discovered the lights were on. So it was just my neighborhood that had been blacked out.
An hour later, I finished my run and walked up through a park to get home. I hopped a stone wall onto the main street, and right there, in front of me, was a telephone pole leaning about thirty degrees from the street and one of those huge barrel transformers smashed to smithereens on the asphalt. That explained the second noise that I�d heard earlier; it had been the transformer�s dying moan. A car had obviously crashed into the pole at a considerably high speed. The area of the street had been closed off to traffic.
We regained power three hours later, at 8 in the morning, which came as a relief because I had a load of laundry to do before finishing my packing. I spent the rest the morning listening to the traffic reports on the radio and laughing when they reported the accident:
�And on Main Street, by such-and-such Road, traffic is blocked off on account of a downed utility pole, caused by an automobile accident, and the detour is likely to be in effect in that area for quite some time.� You�re telling me, I thought. That section of the street looked like a tornado had hit it. That must have been quite a crash indeed.
They were still working on cleaning up the mess and replacing the pole when I left for the airport at 2:30 in the afternoon.
The flight went well, especially considering that I was out like a light for a solid �th of it. We landed at Heathrow at 5:15 a.m. Monday morning. Getting home at that hour was not that stressful as it was well before rush-hour.
I dropped my luggage on the landing outside the flat, and fell into bed for most of the day. When my wife got home from work at 7, she woke me up and I just gazed at her. She was wearing a skirt that really fit her figure and humming one of her silly little songs. At that moment, she was not just �the wife,� as she usually is, but the girl whose looks and carefree attitude I fell in love with five years ago. I was smitten once again. It just goes to show what wonders that getting away from each other for two weeks can do to keep a marriage strong and healthy.
�Hey you,� I said, indicating that she join me. �C�mere ��
The rest, dear reader, is left to your imagination.
� M.E.M.
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Copyright � 2001-2007 by M.E. Manning. All material is written by me, unless explicitly stated otherwise by use of footnotes or bylines. Do not copy or redistribute without my permission.
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