Where were you when the lights went out?

I remember where I was.
I had just left work. A good thing for me, too: whenever the power goes out in a grocery store for more than a minute, everyone on hand scurries into action. The tills have just enough backup power to process whatever customer is in line: after that, we shut down, and everyone on hand scurries for huge sheets of plastic wrap to insulate the bunkers, the frozen deck, the dairy wall, the deli wall, and the produce wet cases. It's a lot of work, and I had unwittingly missed it by a matter of minutes.
I'd missed my bus, too, it turned out. No problem: I had to pick up some ears of corn, among other things, from Zehrs down the road on my way home. Groceries in hand, I was to take a cab home from there.
If decent ears of corn were to be had in my own store, I would have been in line at the express till when the dark hit. But our warehouse had (and has) an awful habit of sending us swill to sell, and our corn at that time was markedly substandard. So: Zehrs.
As I approached the plaza, I noted with a mixture of chagrin and great glee that their power was out: a crowd of had-been and would-be customers was milling around the entrance doors, which were propped open. The chagrin was obvious: I now had little choice but to go home emptyhanded, since I didn't have enough cab fare for a detour or a stopover. The glee--well, less than two weeks prior, Glenridge Plaza had lost power for the better part of a day because somebody had dug where they shouldn't have. That had been a Saturday, the busiest grocery shopping day of the week, and we had reaped a good deal of Zehrs Glenridge's business. Now it appeared to have happened again. Ha.
Undeterred, I made for the direct phone in the lobby. It took something like fourteen rings for Waterloo Taxi to pick up. Having worked at 7-Eleven in Waterloo and called them on numerous occasions, this didn't strike me as at all unusual. But what the dispatcher had to say when she finally came on the line certainly did.
"I'd like to send a cab out for you, sir, but I can't...our radio systems work on electricity and our power's out."
Hmm. Waterloo Taxi's call centre was downtown, several klicks from here. Well--with no groceries to lug, Plan B as in "bus" was still feasible.
The bus, by my sense of time, was several minutes late...and packed. I picked up snatches of conversation right and left.
"...mom says her power's out in Cambridge, too..."
"Ellie? Hon? I'm on my way home but this damn bus is running late..."
"blackout..."
At every stop, people and rumours crowded on, until the air was thick with the overlaid reeks of summertime armpit and rampant speculation. Somebody had called their dad in Detroit: his power was out. Somebody else said her cousin in New York was in the dark too. It took less then four stops before the word "terrorists" had been uttered. In the wake of 9/11, anything bad was obviously the work of terrorists, right?
I have to admit to a sense of trepidation at the thought that al-Qaeda had somehow masterminded this. It was a brilliant opening salvo: deprive people of the one thing they can't survive without, then...
What?
What next?
It took me almost two hours to make the half-hour trip home...I could have made it faster on foot, but I'd already walked a fair piece and it was, as usual, hotter than the hinges of hell outside. I couldn't give up my seat, even if the guy next to me smelled like candied skunk and every word out of every mouth was unnerving me further.
After greeting Eva and explaining my tardiness and lack of groceries, I made a mad dash for our car out in the parking lot...more specifically, for the radio in it. As always when confronted with the unknown, I turned to 680 News in Toronto. Within ten minutes, I was up to speed. No terrorist attack, thank God. No idea when the power would come on again, either.

The rest of that evening passed in a sweltering misery. No way to cook; no Web to surf; no synthesizer to play...not even any light to read by, after a time. Most unpleasantly, no fans. The one thing we had in abundance was sweat. I entertained thoughts of frying up a few eggs on my wife's back. The hard realities come back when the lights go out: we were hooked right through the bag to our electricity habit, just like everyone else. True, Eva could survive indefinitely without power--Eva can survive just about anything short of a direct hit with an H-bomb. Her breadth and depth of knowledge about anything survival-oriented is legendary. But much of the enjoyment would leach out of life right quick if this went on.

Unbeknownst to us, there were places not all that far away that had power. Much of the Niagara region was only out for two hours; Listowel, half an hour northwest of us, got their power back at 9 p.m. Our lights came on at 4:00, waking us out of a thin sleep populated by sweaty demons.

Work the next day was not fun. $35,000 worth of product was tossed. Thanks to well-insulated fridges and freezers, we were lucky that's all we lost. It wasn't covered by insurance, of course. After nearly a year, it was decided that since the blackout was caused outside Ontario, they didn't have to pay up. Big shock there.

We've since come whiskers away from another blackout on more than one occasion. It will happen again: what with our aging transmission grid and our ever-increasing energy gluttony, it has to. Within the next year, we plan on picking up that solar-rechargeable generator Canadian Tire sells. It's the kind of thing that might sit for two or three years, unused and almost forgotten, and then become suddenly indispensable.