Our power went out late last Friday afternoon for no apparent reason. There were no storms in the area, no sirens alerting us to a possible crash into a pole, just the initial alarms from our various appliances as they shut down and followed by the quiet. I reported the outage to our electric provider via my phone and we hopped in the car in the hopes that our local pizzeria would be open. It was and not long after returning home, the power came back on and life was almost back to normal except for the fact that our phone, cable and internet were still out.
Predictions from Xfinity in the texts they sent kept moving the restoration time further into the evening past our bedtime. Since we are creatures of habit and lean towards evening couch potatoes, we were a bit at loose ends. I pulled out my Kindle and continued a novel I’d started and Dave grabbed a professional journal that had been sitting on his side table for a bit and we began to read. While I was being whisked away on a WWI spy adventure, he was reading about actual military intelligence- not so much of an adventure. Eventually he put it down. “Want to play a game?”, I asked. “No.” Then I remembered how we spent our time back in the day.
Our college days predated the internet by decades and almost no one had a television in their room so our primary connection to the outside world was through the radio. Music was our language and most evenings, Alison Steele, WNEW’s “Nightbird” would take us on themed musical journeys into the late night. It was the golden age of rock and when we weren’t listening to our favorite groups on the radio, we were trying to pick out the chords on our guitars.
Dave has continued to play but I have not. So, on this very low tech evening with no other form of entertainment, I suggested he pull out his guitar and play for me, just like the old days. Soon, we were going through his notebook, singing together as he played.
I’d forgotten how much fun it was to just spend time in the moment.