An Evening of Darkness and Light

I was watching the Millionaire show when the screen went blank.

“Oh no!” I banged the remote on the table. “Bob!” I called out to my husband.

He ran in the room, clearly alarmed. “Are you OK?” he said, looking around for the emergency.

“No! There’s no TV!”

“You scared me to death,” he said, shaking his head. And in that instant, we both realized all the electricity in the house was out.

Bob was thrilled. “Isn’t this great?” he said, picking up the canvas wood carrier. “No heat. No lights. No computer.”

“No VCR.” I hung my head. 

“Where’s your spirit of adventure?” he said. “Before we got married you loved roughing it.”

“Before we got married, I lied about a whole lot of things.”

He went outside to the woodpile.

I lit both of our antique glass oil lamps on the mantle. After all, I had to have light so I could read People Magazine. I don’t subscribe to it because I’d be embarrassed for my mail lady to see it. So I sneak it into my shopping cart, cover page down.

By the time Bob came back, the soot from the lamps had made indelible black round spots on the ceiling.

I stood on the couch to light our big beautiful brass kerosene lamp that once hung in a general store. It didn’t take very long for the room to fill with smoke and only took another half a second for the glass globe to shatter. I’m really not sure why everybody says that times were so much simpler years ago.

Bob lit a fire in our old wood stove. He got the flames going by using wooden bellows. “We have a house full of antiques from your parents,” he said. “Won’t it be fun to use some of them?”

“Oh yeah. A blast.” I looked over at the chamber pot and prayed Bob wasn’t referring to that. “We’re going to starve to death, you know. You cannot eat without a microwave.”

“What happened to the nature girl I married?”

“She split. You should have read the fine print on the marriage certificate.”

“It was in Hebrew.”

As the winds howled and the thunder growled, so did my stomach. For the first time, I was glad that Bob enjoyed his hobby of throwing away good money on heavy cast iron frying pans at antique shops and flea markets. He took one down from the wall and put it on top of our wood stove.

“My great-grandmother used skillets like these,” he said, wearing a red and white checkered apron. He dons this frilly thing whenever it’s a special occasion. But it definitely does not make me weak in the knees, if you know what I mean.

“She was a cook in a logging camp in New Hampshire, you know,” he said.

“You might have mentioned that a few thousand times.”

“I remember hearing the story about how she hitched a sled to a team of horses and rode twenty miles in a blizzard to get supplies for the camp.” He looked down at a spot near the hem of his apron. He went to the cabinet, opened a bottle of club soda, poured a little on a paper towel, and blotted the spot. “What story does this night make you think about?” he asked.

I looked up from my magazine. “How Anne Heche broke up with Ellen DeGeneres. Anne just starred in that movie with Harrison Ford. Now, what the heck did Ellen think was going to happen?”

Bob, ignoring me, worked his spatula like a conductor’s baton, punctuating the end of his sentences by raising it in the air and pointing at the ceiling dramatically. “Every morning at dawn, she’d get up before all the men. She used to melt lard in a frying pan, just like this one.”

Then he quickly opened the fridge and got out the bacon.

“We’re going to die if we eat that,” I said.

“The electricity’s only been off for twenty minutes.” He opened the package. “Tell you what. I’m cooking this bacon. If you don’t want it, don’t eat it.” Then, he slowly and sensuously pealed off eight slices and put them in the pan. Most everything Bob does, he does with passion. Sometimes this gets a little weird, if you ask me.

The bacon began to smell like ambrosia as the winds continue to roar. I started to wish the electricity would stay off for a while. Bob took out the cooked bacon and slowly fried thick slices of sourdough bread in the pan. I stared at the flame in one of the glass oil lamps, wondering how many people had sat by this very same lamp on a long, dark night.

Then I looked around for something to do.

“I know you’re bored,” Bob said.

“Look, I’m as much a pioneer as the next woman.”

Bob walked over to the hutch and got out the stereoscope. I think that’s what you call our wooden viewer with a handle, that you put pictures in and they appear in 3D. “Tell me we’re not looking at three dimensional photos of dead bodies in coffins again.”

“No. I bought new ones!” he said. “The Great Chicago Fire!” I grabbed his hand as it headed toward the drawer and shook my head.

So for the next ten minutes, I agreed to look at pictures of visitors to the Grand Canyon. The first twenty were interesting. After that, I started playing de-focusing games with my eyes to get the tourists to appear as if they were smiling and waving in mid-air above the canyons.

Bob put the cooked bacon on the bread and topped each piece with a hunk of sharp cheddar. It only took a minute for the cheese to ooze lusciously over the bacon and down the sides of the bread.

He put quilted place mats on the floor in front of the wood stove where it was warm. Then he lit white candles in my parents’ brass Sabbath candlesticks. "Do you want to try my great-grandmother’s recipe with or without the bacon?” he asked.

I mouthed the word “with”.

The lovely light from the glass front of the stove cast an oval around us.

It was the best tasting and most romantic dinner I ever had.

After supper, I got the pillow from my side of the bed, doubled it up and laid back in front of the stove while I watched the flames. Bob pulled the oak rocker over and took out his embroidery. I watched him carefully separate the threads.

My husband would have done just fine and perhaps even flourished, living in the 1800’s. The piece he’s been working on for over a year will, when he’s done, read:

                   “Keep cleane your samplers.

                   Sleepe not as you sit.

                   For sluggishness doth spoile

                   The rarest wit.”

How lovely to have had this night to live a twinkling of times past. A time when hobbies and artwork replaced the internet and one hour lingered into two. I lolled in front of the dwindling wood stove flames. It was a moment I would remember long after it was inevitably gone by.

While Bob continued to work so steadfastly on his project, I secretly went around the house and turned off all the lights that had been on before we lost electricity.

That way, at least for one lovely, lilting, dreamy night, no one would know when the power came back on.