It was just after midnight and I was on my way to brush my teeth when it happened.
Not that there’s any good time for your house to be suddenly plunged into darkness, but this was fortuitous because I keep an LED lantern on a countertop just inside the bathroom door. I slid the lever up and bathed the sink with light.
Moving cautiously into the hallway I directed the light onto the floor so I could see the way back into my office hoping that the computer had magically escaped the power failure and the piece I was writing had not been lost. It’s funny how my mind allows for the impossible to become possible at times. The screen was as dark as the rest of the house.
Sitting at my desk my mind wandered back to the New York blackout when residents of my apartment building were huddled in the lobby, sipping martinis provided by the Random House editor who lived on the ground floor. I remembered how the warmth of candlelight glowing from his opened door cast a calming vibe in the dark.
With this image in my mind, I picked up the lantern and navigated carefully into the dining room where my grandmother’s brass candlesticks live on my sideboard. I put a candle in each of the four, and as I lit them, I felt the warmth of the glow as they had burned in Grandma Sarah’s little apartment in the Bronx.
Since it was so close to Passover I had matzoh in the house, which I brought to the table. Feeling grateful for my gas stove, I boiled water for tea that I would sip from a glass in honor of my Russian-Jewish grandmother.
I brought my little feast to the dining room table where I would serve a Seder meal in just a few days. But on this night, alone at the table, I was grateful for the unexpected darkness that had once first made me anxious, but now brought me calm..and an early piece of matzoh.
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