Saturday, October 27, 2012: The week of the Great Storm starts
with a bang. My son Matt and daughter-in-law Melany throw me a surprise birthday
party. The surprise is that I didn’t know my sisters Margaret Blackwell from
Maryland and Marian from Tucson would be there. I didn’t know my bio-siblings
from Rhode Island and Connecticut would be there: Terry, Libbie, Pat and
Margaret O and their families.
Jim told me a couple of months ago that Matt was planning a
surprise party. Jim had thrown me a surprise party when I was pregnant with
Matt, and I had reacted poorly, so he was very afraid to repeat the surprise 30
years later. I told Matt I would be too distressed to have a surprise party. So
Matt and Melany went ahead with the party, but didn’t tell me my family was
coming. I knew only that my much-loved new family—Matt’s in-laws Susan (Melany’s
mother), Grandma Bette, Aunt Jayme, Cousin Jay-Jay and her husband Judge John—would
be at the party.
The out-of-towners stayed overnight at a nearby hotel and we
got to spend some time together. I knew my brother Patrick and Cousin Jay-Jay
and Judge John were staunch Republicans, but I hadn’t realized my sister
Margaret Blackwell from Maryland was a rabid Romneyite until we sat talking in
the hotel bar .
Sunday morning at breakfast, everyone was checking iPhones
for news of the storm. My Rhode Island and Connecticut family were anxious to
head North. My sister Margaret Blackwell decided to cut short her visit and get
home before the storm as she headed South.
We stopped at Market Basket in Franklin Lakes with my sister
Marian to pick up tandoori chicken and salad. But I was anxious to get home and
take my 19-year-old son Tom to UrgiCare before it closed at 2. He was so sick
and feverish at the party the night before, deathly pale and with dark circles
under his eyes, I told him he looked like “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
We got to the Urgicare at 1:30. Tom had strep throat. We got
a prescription for antibiotics that we filled at the A&P.
---
Monday, Oct. 29. It
is my sister Marian’s habit to ask every day at about 3 o’clock, “So what are you
thinking about for dinner?” Marian really likes to eat, and she likes to plan
what she will eat.
I consider dinner extremely proprietary information for some
reason. When Jim routinely calls me on his way home in late afternoon to ask
about dinner, I often won’t tell him what I’m making. I will just say, “There’s
food.”
But I tell Marian that today I am planning on pasta,
pre-made turkey meatballs and sausage. I got the sausage today at the A&P
because Tom, sick with strep throat upstairs in his bed, likes sausage.
Marian suggests we set the pasta water to boil at 3:30,
since Hurricane Sandy is expected. So I fill the pot, and set it on the electric
stove.
At 5 minutes before 4, at the time exactly a year ago that
my sister Nora opened her eyes,
fluttered her hands, closed her eyes, breathed four loud breaths,
stopped breathing, breathed two more breaths, and stopped breathing forever, our
power goes out.
I dump the pasta into the hot water, and replace the cover.
By the time we eat about 6 pm, the pasta is extremely mushy.
The meatballs and sausage are nicely browned from the outdoor grill. I heated
the tomato sauce in a pot on the grill.
Tom’s throat is so sore, he can’t swallow the sausage or the
meatballs. He has two helpings of mushy pasta…for him, this is preferable to al
dente. We sit around in the candle-light, and it is really nice to be together.
We go to bed early. All night, the wind howls, shrieks,
hoots. Marian, having a cigarette outside, comes in to advise me to move my
car, since branches are coming down. At one point during the night, the sky
turns bright as day, with extended flashes of what looks like lightning. It is
undoubtedly a substation flaring out of commission.
-------
Tuesday, Oct. 30. I wake up around 5:30 am. Everything
is very dark. I get into my car and go in search of coffee. The Dunkin Donuts
where I usually get coffee is not open, and the tall cardboard display shelves
are set against the glass doors as some sort of propitiatory wind block. I
drive to the other Dunkin Donuts near Don Bosco. It isn’t open either. With
some trepidation I get onto the ramp for Route 17 South. I am an explorer, in
the dark, alone, and my family doesn’t know I’m gone.
Most of the stores on either side of the road are dark. By Lake Street in Ramsey, a car is idling on
the side of the road. But when he sees my lights, he starts moving slowly into
my lane. It is an older gentleman, and he seems ambivalent about being on Route
17. I move over one lane to avoid him.
My son Matt will use
this adjective several times when I talk to him. But, indeed, it does seem
apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic. There are clusters of light here and there,
but mostly this commercial behemoth of a highway is dark and still.
A couple of the Quickie-Mart gas station places are lit and
open, but that’s about it. I go all the way down to Midland Avenue and back
north again. I get coffee at the 7-11 on Franklin Turnpike just south of the
Suffern border.
By the time I pass my usual Dunkin’ Donuts around 7 am, it
is open and there are maybe 40 people on line. The whole complex of stores around the A&P still has power, a
bulwark in the disorder after the storm.
Tom heads back to college, where there is power.
For dinner Tuesday, I
made tortillas stuffed with chicken, cheese and beans, wrapped in foil and
baked on the grill. Mike came later, and brought pizza from Pizza Master for
his dinner.
------
Wednesday, October 31. I told Maeve we HAD to submit three
college applications online. Bard and Villanova had November 1 deadlines for
early action. Vassar’s early decision deadline was November 15, but I wanted to
make sure that Maeve’s most critical application was submitted.
I suggested we go to Lydia and Myrna Dominique’s house,
because they had power and Internet. But Maeve felt Marian and I had bullied
our way into the Dominique household like home invaders the day before when we brought over our
devices to be charged. “Mom, Mrs. Dominique didn’t even have her bra on when
you showed up at the house,” Maeve said. I hadn’t noticed.
“Well, Maeve, if we go back to the Dominiques, I’ll take my
bra off so we are even,” I said.
Maeve didn’t think that was funny.
Mahwah Library was closed for lack of power. Maeve
discovered that Westwood Library was open. My son Mike and Aunt Marian piled in his car,
and Maeve and I in mine, and we headed south.
The library was loaded with patrons huddled around electric
outlets (I joked to Mike, “This is the electronic equivalent of breaking bread
together.”) We couldn’t find a free
plug, and commandeered the reference librarian’s empty desk. Maeve slipped a
multi-outlet surge protector out of her bag and plugged into the outlet. I
plugged in my laptop, she plugged in hers, and Mike plugged in his phone and
his laptop. I got onto the Common Application website, but couldn’t reload
Maeve’s main essay onto her application. (She had been interviewed on Sunday by
two high-powered sisters involved with Vassar – one a nun--- and then had
declared to me, “Your edited version was absolutely riddled with errors.”)
I was looking at her versions of supplemental essays that
she had sent to me, and realizing that the edited essays would have to be sent
back to her, since her laptop was better able to load documents onto the Common
App website. At one point early on, Westwood Library lost WiFi and I thought we
would have to leave and hunt down another venue. But perhaps 20 patrons left,
and the WiFi came back up in about 15 minutes.
People kept coming up to the desk and asking us questions,
thinking we were librarians. We answered questions as best as we could, or
referred people to the check-out desk up front.
The fine-tuning of Maeve’s supplemental essays was a painful
process. She kept saying to me, “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch my laptop.”
I would say, “I have to touch your laptop to do the edits.”
And then the reference librarian said, “I need to move you.
I really have to get my desk back.”
Mike said he was almost fully charged, and he left for his
apartment in Edgewater. Marian had gone out into Westwood to get lunch.
We took our surge protector and went hunting for another
outlet. We found a college-age girl behind the stacks with her phone in one
outlet, and her laptop in the other. We asked whether we could plug in our
surge protector and re-plug her phone into our surge protector.
Finally, we were ready to download the supplemental essays,
to submit the main applications and the supplements and to pay each college’s
application fee online.
I then made Maeve respond to an e-mail from an American
University representative, to set in motion an appointment for an
interview. And finally we were done, for
now. This had been a most painful three hours. I would really rather not be
involved in Maeve’s college application process. But I guess I feel it is my
responsibility to shepherd things along.
Both heading down to Westwood and returning home to Mahwah,
we were amazed at the lines of cars, especially on Route 17, waiting for gas.
“It’s just like the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973,” I said.
For dinner, we had hamburgers made from the huge quantities
of ground beef Jim had bought at the A&P on Saturday, and potato pancakes
from Market Basket.
I ran to church at 7:20, and sang at the sparsely-attended
vigil Mass for All Saints’ Day.
Thursday, November 1. Marian hands me a card and wishes me a Happy Birthday as she
gets ready to go to the airport with Jim for her return trip to Tucson.
I see birthday greetings to me on Facebook when I get on the
Internet through my iPad. My son Mike adds on Facebook…. “though I know you
can’t see this because you have no power.”
I wish my sister Libbie, born on the same day six years
later, a Happy Birthday.
Maeve has been going to the nearby home of her friends with
power, Myrna and Lydia Dominique, and she brings them into the main hall of our
home, where I have been sitting. I think they walked up the drive because the
Ramsey Oil Truck was blocking the driveway, making a fuel delivery. There is no
heat, though, because of the power outage.
“I’ll bring Myrna and Lydia back at 5:30, and we’ll go to
dinner for your birthday,” Maeve says.
Jim had taken a shirt and a blanket with him on his way to
work in Newark this morning, saying he planned to sleep in the office
overnight.
Tom calls from Bard College to wish me a Happy Birthday.,
“How are you able to talk on the house phone if you’ve lost
power?” he asks.
“Ah,” I say. “That is the miracle of the dump.” At the town recycling center months ago, I
had retrieved a phone with caller ID that worked on battery power, so it was
still functional. The phone quality was poor, but at least I could make and
receive calls.
In the afternoon, I went to town hall to pay my quarterly
property taxes and water bill. I had to skirt Franklin Turnpike on the way
home. It was backed up for maybe a mile with cars waiting to get gas.
Once I got home, I realized I would have to go back to the
bank to deposit money to pay mortgages and household bills for November. I met a woman in the bank parking lot who
said she had waited three hours on line to get gas. She was watching gas station
attendants walk through the line on Route 17, telling motorists the gas had run
out.
I feel strangely de-energized myself. I didn’t feel like
myself, and I had few daily goals other than organizing dinner. My son Mike said that the unexpected loss of his daily routines
left him feeling ragged.
Light and power are normalcy;
electric light and power are somehow part of our personal and cultural
identity.
It seems I am who I am because I can write and email on my
laptop. I can print on my printer. I can pick up my phone and call and text
without thinking of conserving the battery. I can make a cup of tea at will. I
can laugh with David Letterman or Conan or Jon Stewart deep into the night on
my television. Who am I if I do not have these sources of media and daily living
routines at my disposal?
And, even when I am alone, I feel I am having social
interactions when I can watch folks (friends?) on TV, and read the news and
blogs on my laptop.
We went to Pasta Cucina in outer Suffern. Maeve and the
girls ordered fried calamari for an appetizer. We giggled all through dinner. I
called Marian before we ordered. She was eating a salad in Chicago.
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