It had been a long and exhausting Holy Week, but a truly blessed one as well. Throughout Lent, I spent a lot of time studying scripture and religious texts and did not attend as much to my other writings. As I headed home last night, I got a call from a friend, asking if I wanted to get together for a drink. As we talked at a local shop, he asked about my writing and I admitted that I had not been doing as much poetry or essay writing recently as I would have liked.

On my way home, I listened to some of the New York Public Library’s podcast of Ann Patchett & Elizabeth Gilbert on Writing. At home, I chatted briefly with my wife and daughter and decided to head to bed early. I was still overtired from Holy Week.

For the past month or two, I’ve been getting up at 5 AM to study, and then do my morning social media connections and daily ablutions starting at 6. I would get on the road a little bit after seven for a leisurely drive to work, stopping here and there along the way to play a little Ingress, and still being able to get into the office early. To get sufficient sleep, I try to go to bed by 9 PM. In my effort to get a little extra sleep, I must have gone to bed between 8:30 and 8:45.

At some point in the night, I woke up, aware that my wife Kim was in bed next to me. I glanced over at the clock radio and it was blank. Kim was reading by flashlight and explained to me that the power had gone out. We haven’t had a lot of power outages this winter, but it was windy, so this didn’t come as a great surprise. I rolled over and went back to sleep, figuring that the power would be back on by the time I got up in the morning.

At another point, I was awoken by the cat who wanted to go out into the living room but was hampered by a closed door. I let him out and grabbed my cellphone. It was around midnight. The wind was still blowing hard and the lights were still out.

It was a night filled with strange dreams. In one dream, we were back at the yacht club we had been a member of years ago when I worked on Wall Street. In another, Kim had gotten a great new job. Other details of each of these dreams have vanished. The third dream was particularly disturbing. We were camping somewhere, or something like that. There was an explosion and we went to a neighboring campsite to make sure everyone was okay and see what was going on. At one point, I went up near the crater from the bomb. I looked up towards the hills and saw a man in a brown pickup truck with Ohio license plates driving past us. He tossed something from the window, and I realized it was another bomb. I turned, ran, and dove for cover as the bomb exploded, filling my back with shrapnel.

A little before six in the morning, the dog started barking. There were trucks outside, which I assumed were there to restore the power. With no power, I couldn’t do many of my morning rituals, either online, or in terms of breakfast and shower. So, I rested in bed, hoping the power would be back in any moment. Finally, and 6:40, I got up, to a sponge bath and headed off to work.

I had driven a short ways down the road when I remembered that I had forgotten to grab a book for a study group this evening. I turned around and went back home to find that the power was back on. So, I took a moment to make myself some breakfast and take a proper shower.
As I drove back to work, I thought of those for whom the inconveniences of the day make the power outage seem insignificant. I thought of refugees who stayed in their home towns far longer than it was safe to do so. My mind wandered to the book Dhalgren and the family that lived in aware in the autumnal city.

I started writing this at the beginning of the day, but only now, at the end of the day, do I get a chance to finish it. I’d like to write more on this, but it is time for bed and I have plenty of other topics to explore in later blog posts.