Darkness

November 10, 2023

Cool drizzle after weeks of extended summer.

Cancelled my trip to the beach, for no particular reason other than that I thought it was, somehow, the wrong time. 

Driving home after rehearsal last night, I realized that all was dark from a certain point north. No streetlights, no traffic signals, just buildings and corners rendered unfamiliar by the sweeping lamps of cars. Home loomed profoundly dark. My unreadiness for such an event was made clear to me, being without a usable flashlight and with only one candle in the house. But I managed to pour myself a hefty vodka and make it to the front porch, where I discovered I had been given one of the loveliest nights of my life, soft and purplish, but lit by the city lights southward under the clouds so that every detail of the landscape was, if rich and strange, discernible. I longed for a bear to share the porch, but that did not happen. I sat the while in a kind of ecstasy, joyful and worshipful, wondering what small thing– or perhaps a power failure is a large thing after all– could turn life around. I poured out my spirit like a fountain. Silence came with darkness, and holiness with silence. Wondrous beautiful to me, for perhaps an hour. When the lights came on it was jarring. The streetlight at the end of my drive pounded white and solar and almost unbearable across the grass. 

The blackout was caused, it is rumored, by a drunken or otherwise disoriented driver taking out a utility pole in front of McDonald’s. 

Huge rehearsal at First Baptist. I’m not the asset in this concert that I sometimes am. I hear the men on either side of me pronouncing Hungarian and Slovak at 50 miles an hour . . . .