The list of things I'll not ever take for granted is growing.
For a long time, the lone item on that list was indoor plumbing, as I'd lived without it for 11 years as a child and adolescent. I added air conditioning to that list after July got off to a flying stop with an air-conditioning unit discovered, on July 1, to be kaput ... and which, except for a couple of brief periods, stayed on the blink a total of seven days.
I've just added another item that I neglected to add eons ago ... electricity.
Recently, Dre and I got a rude awakening from our naive notion that because of the location of our downtown Little Rock apartment building, we wouldn't ever suffer a long-term power outage. It's within hollering distance of the Governor's Mansion. We figured the First Mansion would be protected by generators during an outage, but still assumed we were in an area considered to be high priority for power restoration.
That changed on July 10. Nasty little storm came through and knocked the lights off for maybe an hour and a half. Tough when you live in an all-electric place, but an hour and a half is manageable. Yeah, well, the July 10 storm was just the dress rehearsal. On July 14, the bigger, nastier storms blew into the state and knocked out power to 137,000 households serviced by the state's main electric company. Including ours.
The power stayed off that night. We woke up to the same situation, which remained the same as the day wore on. The food in the fridge wasn't getting any colder or younger, so late that afternoon we began calling and texting around to see where we could haul it and cook it up. Coming home that night after borrowing the kitchen of an obliging friend who never lost his electricity, we saw lights on in homes around the corner from our place ... streetlights blazing on our street ... but our building was still dark.
Next morning: Still no electricity. A number of social media friends and co-workers said their power had either stayed on or quickly been restored; not so for us. We looked out the window, listened for work crews. Nothing. Watched the neighbors across the street going about their usual business, assumed they had electricity, and gritted our teeth. Despite hearing the loud hum of what was probably said neighbors' generators, we began to feel forgotten.
Yes, we'd seen and received the notices. That most customers would have power by Sunday; some might have to wait until Tuesday. We knew that 1,200 extra electric company employees had been trucked in to fix our problems and that they were working feverishly to restore normalcy. But we were not in some isolated area. We were in downtown Little Rock, dang it -- the Governor's Mansion Historic District! We were close enough to the First Mansion to walk over in our flowerdy muumuu, rollers and house shoes and borrow the proverbial cup of sugar!
But we weren't the only ones who continued to suffer while watching neighbors enjoy relief. Proof of that lay in the complaints on the electric company's Facebook page. "Can they send a work truck to fix the rest of [our street]? Everyone around us has power but us," one woman complained. A Little Rock neighborhood group on Facebook revealed that others on streets near ours were still without.
I then thought of how quickly, when we humans suffer a perceived crisis, we forget about those whose suffering is so much worse than ours. I also thought of how easy it can be to take so much for granted. Hubby and I not only took electricity for granted, we wrongly assumed we wouldn't have to suffer a long power failure. We were wrong, but were still much more fortunate than, say, those in Third World countries where electricity is a luxury. And we were certainly better off than those who are now dead or hurt after wrongly assuming that they'd be safe celebrating a national holiday on the French Riviera ... nightclub partying in the land of Disney World ... simply attending school/college ... or attending a prayer meeting at church.
In our increasingly volatile society, the worst thing any of us can do is continue to assume that the bad stuff can only happen to those people in that neighborhood/area/place.
No place is immune from inconveniences, misfortunes or downright tragedies.
Forty-eight hours after we lost power, it was restored. The lesson I learned will, I hope, stay with me: I should add freely and liberally to that list of things I'll not take for granted. There's been too much evidence of how easily those things can be taken away.
Email:
Style on 07/24/2016