“What a nightmare.”
“I hate this!”
“I’m sooooo hot …”
“When is the power coming back on?”
Children lay strewn around the family room, melting on the furniture like Dali’s surreal clocks. The freezer door concealed a horror of melted ice cream and thawed fish. Though the temperature in the room was bearable, the heat pressed in from all sides, and we knew that eventually it would win. It was, in short, an atmosphere of lassitude, complaint and mounting squalor.
Some bad children had tipped oatmeal and Cheerios into the kitchen sink rather than finishing their helpings or putting the scrapings in the trash. Most of the liquid had drained away, leaving circlets of cereal stuck to the ceramic and an inch of disgusting milky water. With no power, we couldn’t run the disposal to wash it all away.
This was a manual job of a most repulsive kind. I pushed my hand into the terrifying maw of the disposal unit, praying that the power wouldn’t suddenly come on.
“Blech!” I cried, pulling out handfuls of goo.
“I’m soooo hot …” repeated a querulous voice from the other room.
“When is the power coming back on?” repeated someone else.
“This is unbelievable,” I muttered petulantly, feeling around for stray Cheerios.
It is hard in such circumstances to keep one’s cool, and we weren’t doing very well. Friday’s storm had knocked out power to our family house (and probably yours). Our back fence lay smashed under the weight of the tree limbs that littered the yard. The contents of our fridge were nearly as scary as what lay in the freezer, we had no hot water, my car was almost out of fuel (and our local gas stations were closed) and Pepco had informed our neighborhood that it could be another five days before our electricity was restored.
Yet the worst thing, I am sorry to say, was our attitude.
What was the matter with us? Were we not Americans? Could we not handle a few electricity-free days without bawling and squabbling like spoiled toddlers?
In a flash it struck me: If ever there were a time for me to exert leadership over my platoon (not to mention over myself), it was now. Suddenly filled with only slightly bad-tempered zeal, Mrs. George Patton marched into the living room.
“Children,” I announced, “We have no power. It is a drag. We are all roasting. We do not improve our situation by complaining. In fact, we make it worse.”
The children turned damp faces towards me.
“So from now on,” Mrs. Patton continued, “No one in this family is allowed to whine or grumble. There are people all over the country dealing with the same situation. There are people all over the world who deal with much worse situations every single day. So not a word. Got it?”
There was a pause. Their sulky expressions vanished.
“Got it,” they said.
And they meant it. I hadn’t expected fierce resistance, but I also hadn’t anticipated such swift and total compliance. Perhaps the children had been as bored and annoyed by their own grumpiness as I was; perhaps, indeed, they had unconsciously yearned for a bit of Patton-like bucking up.
At any rate, it was a turning point in our ordeal. The temperature didn’t drop, but everyone perked up. And why not? We were alive. Our house hadn’t been smashed by a colossal tree, as had happened to two neighbors (both families were unhurt, thank God). We had clean running water; so what if it was unheated?
A few days later, when Pepco had brought all our machines to life again and the children once more felt free to complain, I found myself thinking back fondly to that wonderful feeling of unit cohesion in a time of trial.
“It’s funny,” I said to my husband, as we sipped coffee to the pleasant hum of the dishwasher. “I almost miss the power being out.”
“Ah,” he said, “Stop that crazy talk.”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
