Almighty Power

You may have heard on the news that Chicago had a gigantic thunderstorm yesterday. 70-80 mph winds, apparently. I was working in my cubicle, when the lights flashed once, then went dead. My computer blinked out, too, of course. So I wandered out into the hallway where I found the music professor and the registrar, and we looked out the hall windows at the ongoing deluge. Then the lights flicked back on for about five seconds, and then there was a huge FLASH in the street - a transformer exploding, as it turns out, and everything went dead again. Then Wolf, our wirey and wise maintenance man, came tearing through and yelled at us to GO TO THE BASEMENT because a tornado had been sighted. So, with my yellow legal pad still in hand, I went down to the basement with everyone else. We all went to the laundry room (which is for students who live in the seminary dorm rooms) and stood around the washing machines, listening to WGN on one of those mini-boomboxes, which I think were in vogue in perhaps the early 90s. WGN went back and forth from the Cubs game (in California, I think?) to the tornado and weather updates.

Eventually, we could go upstairs. But there was no going back to work - no computers, no lights, no copier. So I went home. Dug out my candles and matches so I would be ready when the sun went down. And finished a novel sitting next to the window.

Now, going to bed with a candle is kind of romantic. Even fumbling up and down our pitch-black, windowless stairwells wasn't too bad. Since our stoves are electric, my neighbors and I went out for pizza - while the weather still resembled a monsoon - and when we came home - to an apartment building whose windows were only ever-so-faintly glowing from the odd candle here and there - they lent me a flashlight to get back upstairs and find my keyhole. All that was kind of fun. But then in the morning, there was no hot water to shower, wash dishes, or wash my face, no stove to heat water, no radio for NPR, no microwave, the refrigerator was starting to warm up, my cell phone was running out of power and so was my laptop... and I couldn't really go to work to earn money for my poor little unemployed self because I need a computer to do most or any of my work, there.

It's amazing how a minor crisis can introduce a general feeling of urgency and scarcity. I heard sirens on Sheridan Road last night - and there are ALWAYS sirens on Sheridan Road - but last night, they felt pretty unsettling to me. It seemed like the world might be unraveling at the edges in all kinds of places. What if this lasted a long time? Everyone was saying, "Well, replacing transformers takes a LONG time, blah blah blah." What if I had no hot water for three days? What if people starting looting? What if people were getting hurt out there because of... bad things???

I can only imagine what it must have been like to survive something like Hurricane Katrina, or the 2005 tsunami, or even the terrible flooding happening in other parts of the Midwest. I was so thankful to have a dry mattress, a working toilet, food, and a town full of stores that still had electricity, no problem. I bought ice and a cafe latte this morning! Woo hoo. And civil order seemed to be in place, just fine. But it was scary for a while.

Next, we just started trying to adapt and normalize the whole situation. We stood outside in the parking lot, joking about the noise the generator was making (Wolf was trying to keep the sump pumps going to drain the four inches of water out of the library stacks in the seminary basement - luckily, the books are a foot off the floor). We had a seminary community meeting with donuts, plenty of Bible jokes, and brainstorming and problem-solving. Our liturgy professor went to get out the candles from the sacristy for people who still needed them. And then my neighbor Jennifer and I packed ourselves up to go to a coffeeshop. We wanted to power our laptops and cell phones up - I was going to write my sermon for Sunday (which, ahem, I still haven't quite written yet) and Jennifer was going to rewrite her ordination service bulletin (her personal laptop and journal was stolen yesterday, and the only copy of her bulletin was on the laptop, and her ordination is in a week, but that's a whole other story).

And just as we were heading down into my pitch-black stairway... all the lights came back on! It was GREAT. It'll sound kind of trite or dramatic, but it was just such an amazing moment. Our lives could go back to normal. But you know, it was also a little anti-climactic. We'd gotten ourselves so psyched up to live with adversity, and then boom, it all dissolved with one banal, fluorescent poof.

But we decided to go out for lunch to celebrate, and stuffed ourselves with eggrolls, crab rangoon, chicken with peanut sauce, and Thai pork with noodles. It was pretty great. Then I worked for several hours. And now everything seems back to normal.

What a weird day.