I really didn’t question it too much when the resident gate didn’t open, even after I pressed the remote three or four times. (Yes, we live in a gated townhome community, and for the record, I’m still ambivalent about that.) The gates seem to malfunction at least one day a week. Besides, the center gate, which is supposed to be used by visitors, appeared to be wide open and stuck that way, so I backed up and drove in through that.

But the garage door wouldn’t open for its remote either. Granted, it’s balky sometimes, but even when I pulled up right in front of it, nothing happened. “I’ll leave the car here and open the door from inside,” I told the kids, “…unless we don’t have power.” No pun intended, but the light was beginning to dawn.

Once we opened the front door (with my key), the light went back out again.  Or it might have been out for awhile; we weren’t sure, but the light I usually leave on in the kitchen (which has no windows) was off. There was no way of knowing how long the power had been out, because all of the clocks were either blank or running on batteries. It was one of the hottest days of the year – temperatures had hit triple digits that day – but since the thermostat is one of those programmable electronic ones, we couldn’t tell exactly how warm it was in the house. We just had to try to find the cool spots.

I called my husband – on his cell phone, from my cell phone – to let him know what was happening; luckily, he was still on his way home and offered to pick up pizzas for dinner. I called the electric company next. I usually do contact them about long-lasting outages; even though I’m pretty sure they have sophisticated monitoring equipment and know about these things when they happen, I just want to check they’re aware and working on the problem. Fortunately, they were, although they couldn’t tell me any more than that.

We started our evening at loose ends, with no idea when things would get back to normal. My stepdaughter and I have laptops, but no one could go online because the router needs electricity. (And I was taking the next couple of days off from work because I had a lot of things I needed to do online. This was not ideal timing at all.) No TV, no Wii, no computer…what would we do?

We gathered around the dining table to eat our pizzas, and to speculate about what was happening and when it might be over. Tall Paul was reasonably certain it wouldn’t last much longer, believing that most outages were resolved within a few hours. I shared some of my favorite electricity horror stories with them – people I’d known who’d been without power for a week or more – but since all of those stories had been associated with major storms, it was unlikely that we’d experience that. We were having a serious heat wave, but it was calm – no Santa Ana winds with this one, thank goodness, and no wildfires within miles of us.

When I took the dog out for her walk around 6:15, I asked one of the neighbors if she knew when we’d lost power, and learned that it had already been out for over two hours. Then, as Gypsy and I were returning home, I saw a SoCal Edison truck come through the still-open center gate. Feeling a little more confident that we’d get power back very soon, I went out on the patio to read my book; it was still fairly light out there, and getting just slightly cooler. Meanwhile, Tall Paul and the kids played poker around the dining table.

My confidence was getting shaky when we were still without power over half an hour later, and it was getting dark quickly. Despite the heat, I’m actually not that disturbed by power failures during the day, because there’s still plenty of light outside; sometimes, they’re actually a good excuse to kick back and relax with a book or some other old-fashioned activity. The closer it gets to evening, though, the less I can do and the more anxious I get. I decided to take another walk – without the dog this time – and see if that Edison truck was still around. When I didn’t see it – and there really aren’t many places it could have been, so I would have seen it – I wasn’t sure what to think. Were they done? Were they working somewhere else? Had they disappeared? Would we be without power all night long?

But as I approached the corner near our house, I noticed that the street lights were suddenly glowing…and then I heard the sound of thirty-some-odd air conditioners kicking on at the same time. Neighbors who had gathered in their driveways to chat the evening away jumped up in celebration. I paused in our front door, saying “And there was much rejoicing!” as I flicked the wall switch to turn on the living-room lamps. It was pretty impressive for both the electricity and me to return at almost the same time, actually. Tall Paul and Spencer greeted me with “What did you say to them?”

I was pretty powerless, to be honest. While I’ve worked on my control issues and made some progress at letting go of what I can’t control, the longer this lasted, the harder it was for me to me to accept. Sometimes life just hands you metaphors.

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