Candlelight

J. and I had invited a friend and coworker of J.'s and her husband over for dinner on Saturday. They were scheduled to arrive around 6:00. At 3:00, gale-force winds appeared seemingly out of nowhere. At 4:00, the power went out in our building.

Somehow, I have managed to avoid power outages throughout my adult life – there may have been one or two short ones when I lived in New York in the eighties, but that's about it. When I was kid, though, they were common – the power grid in that part of the world at the time was already overtaxed, ill-maintained and grossly mismanaged. To that end, my parents have always kept copious numbers of candles in the house, would light a dozen or so as soon as we lost electricity, and go about their business as if nothing happened. We couldn't watch television, but with nothing but four government-run channels, only three of which would come in with any degree of clarity, it's not like there was a whole lot to watch anyway. Perhaps it was those experiences that engendered in me a love of candlelight at an early age, more likely it was the general sense of romance and mystique associated with it. Suffice it to say I love candles, and J. and have been keeping a big box of them in the closet, but for whatever reason we've hardly used them. Until Saturday.

I briefly considered calling off the dinner and going out instead, but since most of the food was already prepared, the gas in the stove was flowing, and I had two full boxes of matches in a kitchen drawer, with our guests' consent I decided to go ahead. We lit every candle we could find, jury-rigged a flashlight over the stove, and proceeded to have one of the most memorable evenings in recent memory.

My choice of menu proved serendipitous – Italian appetizers didn't need any cooking (except for the peppers which I had roasted earlier) and the short ribs had been braised in the morning. The only thing I actually had to cook by candlelight was the risotto, and though we had only a vague idea of what it, or everything else for that matter, looked like, we could tell by the taste that I didn't mess up too badly. To my surprise, I didn't feel any more stressed about getting everything on the table than I would have with full electric lighting, and once we actually sat down to eat, it was lovely.

The candlelight sparkled in the wine and water glasses on the table and gave J.'s coworker, whose skin and hair are naturally very light, a mysterious, Feast in the time of Plague pallor. Pretty quickly we realized that you lose much more than light when the power goes out – you lose noise. We couldn't have any music on, obviously, but even beyond that, it was deathly quiet – no refrigerator sounds, no sounds filtering through from neighbor's apartments, however faint, nothing. It seems that even when there is nothing identifiable making noise, there is always some amount of white noise present, something is always humming somewhere, the silence is never total. Now it was complete. When the building's generator started up downstairs to power the emergency lighting, I could hear it so distinctly that I could have probably counted the revolutions of its drive shaft by ear.

The lack of power was also strangely liberating. In an instant, we had to accept that there were things that we simply would not be able to do, like look at photos for example, or look up on the internet random things that came up in conversation. We had no choice but to focus on the conversation and one another. We haven't known J.'s coworker and her husband for very long, and the relative lack of activity options forced us, gently, to ask more personal questions. Of course, the evening didn't pass without its comic moments. When I offered everyone coffee, and our guests smirked “how are you going to make it?” I proudly produced a French press only to realize that I had no way of grinding the beans unless I resorted to mortar and pestle.

Aafter dinner, we lingered over some delicious Australian semillon as the candles started to burn out one by one, said our goodbyes around 11:00, apologizing for having to make our guests walk down twelve flights of stairs, then turned in, happy not to be able to set our alarm clocks. The power was finally restored at 10:00 a.m. Sunday morning.