The Night The Lights Went Out In Terre Haute

LET’S FACE IT; I CAN NO LONGER SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT. It’s not Insomnia, or Noisy Neighbors. It’s something else called, “I gotta go potty.” This happens at least once each night, regardless of my fluid intake and that is why we have a small nightlight in the bathroom.

When I crawl out of bed in the middle of the night, more than half asleep, it is like a scene from the movie, “Poltergeist.”

“Go toward the light, Carol Ann! Go toward the light!”

Without that nightlight, well….I hate to think about it.

One night last week, Sunday it was, things came close to tragedy.

A deeply hidden part of my brain woke me up and told me that it was time to take a stroll. I sat up and almost immediately knew that something was wrong. There was no nightlight, no illuminated alarm clock, and no numbers shining on the TV cable box. It was dark – REALLY DARK.

Our power was out. Either that or I was still asleep and dreaming.

I was awake, and after a very slow, sans nightlight, trip to the Euphemism I got back to the bed and went back to sleep.

It turns out that at about 4 AM or so a limb from a dead tree in a neighbor’s yard fell and sheared off the top ten feet of the pole holding the power lines. The entire neighborhood was crawling to the bathroom in the dark.

Great. Just great.

At 6 AM the battery powered alarm clock that gets used only on Sundays went off and woke me up for keeps. It was still dark as a giraffe’s tongue.

I got dressed by the light of my cell phone. Shaving was hit-and-miss, mainly miss. I then went slowly downstairs (slower than usual) to make tea. Oops! Mr. Coffee was as dead as Joe DiMaggio.

It’s not all that busy at Starbucks at 6:30 on a Sunday morning. A coffee for me and a tea for Dawn, please.

When the sun finally came up we could get a better look at the damage caused by the falling tree limb. It took out the power lines, several large live tree limbs, and a sizeable chunk of the fence between the two properties. And all of it was piled high in our yard.

Great. Just great.

The Power Company got into action quickly. They knocked on our door and explained that the only access, and ergo the only way to fix things, was through our yard – BUT (Why must there always be a BUT with these things?). BUT – they needed to bring in their BIG trucks, and given the fact that it had been raining for a couple of days, their BIG trucks were likely to chew up our lawn.

What choice did we have?

1. Power and no grass
2. Grass and a 17^th century existence along with the need for a wood-burning TV.

We gave them the OK to proceed and off we went to church.

When we returned home our street looked like the staging area for the D-Day Invasion of Europe. The lawn looked like the test grounds for newer and bigger Battle Tanks.

According to the Power Company Dudes the Company would send out a crew to clean it all up and repair the lawn.

“You’ll never even know we were there.”

Sure.

There was one other area of concern that Sunday – Baseball. The Dudes said that they would have our power restored by 3:45 PM. I told them that it was critical because the Giants game started at 4:05 and our priorities were Baseball, then Family, then Food and, coming in at #673 was the survival of the Power Company Dudes.

Power came back on at 3:25 PM and everyone survived.

Now we want to see how long it will be before our yard no longer looks like an extreme close-up of the face of Tommy Lee Jones.

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