My Kingdom for a Flashlight

One year in May, my husband flew up to Canada to spend time with his grandmother, who was very ill with cancer. I was home alone with the kids. One night, I went into the garage and plugged in the treadmill, thinking I would try to exercise a little…what a mistake!

No sooner had I plugged in the stupid thing that I heard a “swish” sound, and then—everything went black. I mean, completely black! Panicked, I groped my way back into the house, desperate to find the children, and sat them down on the couch in the living room.

“Okay,” I gasped. “Where are all the flashlights?” 

I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them mumbling to each other. We had several flashlights in the house, but the children liked to play with them, run down the batteries, and then stuff them under their beds.

“Well, we were playing a game…”  One began.

“Just tell me where I can find a flashlight.“ I tried to stay calm. “We have three or four of them.” 

“…and in the game we were in a cave…”

“Please. Where are the flashlights?”

Silence.

I made a choking sound and felt my way back to the garage where I thought I had seen one recently and almost fainted with relief when I realized it was still there. Grasping it firmly, I flicked on the switch, and…nothing. The batteries were, needless to say, dead. 

Oh, my God! My home was now a death trap and I had to get the children to safety! I felt around for the phone (did the phone run on electricity??) and called my father, who sped over and whisked the kids back to his house.

He also brought me a flashlight that actually worked (understandable because he doesn’t have small children). I was nervous, my stomach was doing flips, and it still hadn’t occurred to me to call the power company. Instead, I ran across the street and asked the neighbor to come and see if he could figure out what was wrong. 

He was a man, after all, and might, by virtue of his gender, know what to do!

Was it a matter of flipping a switch in that little box that was stuck to the side of the house (if we could find the box), or a blown fuse (whatever that was)?  The neighbor diligently checked everything he could think of, to no avail. 

He suggested that I call an electrician because it appeared that power was surging through the house. Yikes!

Sure enough, lights flashed then dimmed, from one end of the house to the other. If that wasn’t bad enough, I heard a creepy hissing noise, which made me think the whole house could explode at any moment! The neighbor gave up and left (fled, I think), and I looked in the yellow pages, hands shaking, by the dim light of my borrowed flashlight, for the phone number of an emergency electrician.

About thirty minutes later, as I sat huddled in my dark living room, willing myself not to cry, the electrician arrived, and I showed him the outlets that were making the hissing noises. 

At one point, he crouched to examine an outlet and when he stood, he banged his head really hard on a heavy shelf that hung on the wall. I felt terrible about that.

Well, $140 dollars later (!!), he told me to call the power company. It was a problem with the power coming into the house and electricity was, indeed, surging through the lines. 

I called the power company and then waited for the house to burn down around me, trapping me in a fiery inferno. 

The power company people said yeah, they would come out some time in the morning. Well I’d be burned to a crisp by then—my children motherless! I drove to my parents’ house and crawled into bed with the kids.

Thank God the car still worked.

I lay there for a long time, wondering if I still had a house.

I found out that during the blackout, Rob’s grandmother, in Canada, died.

In the morning, the power people came out, acknowledged that it was their fault, refused to pay for the electrician, set up a temporary connection, and left. 

Needless to say, trying to exercise causes nothing but trouble.

And when the kids and I felt safe enough to return to the house, we discovered that our nightmare had not yet ended!

The dog, in the middle of all the trauma, had been stung by a bee and her face was swollen to three times its normal size! Oh, yes!

My guess is she cleverly caught a bee in her mouth, and of course, it stung her.  She looked absolutely wretched in a grossly contorted yet fluffy way.

Depressed, I gazed at her, wondering what else could possibly go wrong.

“We will take her to the vet—right, Mom?” 

Poor little Adam—he didn’t realize how little I cared about the plight of the dog at that particular moment.

“Right, Mom?”  Sara spoke up encouragingly.

Poor Sara—clearly she thought I was more conscientious than I really was.

“Mom? Shouldn’t we take her now? Look, her tongue is swollen. She doesn’t look so good!” 

Adam was starting to cry.

Damn! The last thing I wanted to do at that moment, after the night I had, was take the stupid dog to the vet!! 

So after making a high-pitched, rather unpleasant sound, I snapped at them to get her in the car (she barely fit, she was so puffy) and we drove to the vet. 

And the vet charged me $65 to give the dog an antihistamine.