It takes a crew of two trucks and a van from Corpus Christi to flip the switch. Just like that our power is restored. We’re sitting at home with a fresh fire roaring in the fireplace, having taken my Mom to vote and to shop for this and that and wait.

First we hear the alarm from the refrigerator beep. Then the sweet hum of a house waking up. Like George Bailey throwing a joyful kiss to the Bailey Building and Loan as he sloshes down the snowy streets, I tear up when I see the radiating pie slice indicating my reliable internet signal is back. I peel off another thick sweater as the heat rises and my old life resumes.

We’ve ground to a halt and still it goes on. A day measured in smallish activities. Trying to write about this past week but unable to post a “glad game” thought on Facebook. The guy who uses the leaf blowers on his lawn while the rest of the neighborhood is plunged into darkness because of a climate gone awry because of stupid uses of gas like leaf blowers makes me crazy now.

I’m writing because that’s all that’s left.

The temperature continues to fall. I’ve access to electricity, a signal, a semblance of normalcy. But still the sense of supreme dislocation remains.

Plans fall apart. People drift away. We read the paper. Walk the dog and I do another business call before we go for a short walk.

With dog on leash, we walk the neighborhood. The generators used by the impossibly rich nearby purr. Their lawns are tidy. The wood neatly piled. I bet their tanks are full and their kids are acing their exams.

Dinner is pasta at the local Italian restaurant. It’s come to that.

A painful day in the city with our son, his black eye and sore shoulder. We walk listlessly around Brooklyn, checking out Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, decoding the signs of gentrification and realizing that we’re too old and unwilling to wait the dubious five years or so until the Jamaican Patty place gives way to the cheese shop. We see the community gardens, the comfy restaurants, the yoga studio in Prospect Heights and feel a sense of generosity and possibility.

We head back to my son’s apartment and watch “Sound of my Voice” a mesmerizing and deeply uncomfortable film working hard to maintain a balance between ambiguity and clarity. You could sense the goal of the film was to generate heated arguments on the way out of the theater.

We probably should have chosen a comedy.

We left feeling dispirited and tense. Seeing our son in pain is hard. Sensing that he’s lonely and a bit isolated is harder.

We’re home now, a bit earlier than we wanted. We fall back on our new routine. We do yoga by the fire. Try to drown out the growing roar of the generators. Our neighbor has purchased one today. The guy across the street whom we suspect of working for Homeland Security has one. Take a hot bath and lie under impossibly thick layers of blankets grateful for the extra body heat and hoping that sleep comes.

Eventually it’s dawn.

We learn that Con Ed won’t commit to our power coming back on for at least another week. Buoyed by last night’s good luck, we get down to business this morning. Thanks to the fact that our stovetop works, we can make coffee, tea, oatmeal. A bit like can-do pioneers. I wait until the library opens and claim a hard back chair overlooking the steely Hudson River. Life is beginning to resume its normal flow. Train service between us and the city has begun again. Our son is at home resting. And I’m writing a speech with scant input from the client. I’m in make-it-up mode, channeling voices of people I’ve never met. Finished, I buy a head of Boston lettuce. By now our refrigerator is officially useless. And so we spend a few hours attacking the scum and dried decaying vegetable ooze with the zeal of stranded swimmers in the middle of the ocean who have convinced themselves that the secret of being saved is kicking purposefully forward.

Momentum is all.

Dinner at my Mom’s home which was touching in countless ways, not the least of which is watching “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (again) knowing she’ll respond warmly to the film, its theme and gentle story.

There is no one quite like Dame Judi Dench.

Today is a climax of ill will, bad luck and stagnation, like an extreme I Ching hexagram. Woke up to find a tick on me. My head was spinning, literally. Maybe it was a head cold. Or cardiovascular disease or worse yet a tumor. All likely possibilities that I sift through while lying in bed waiting for the sun to rise and see if what I was feeling on me was indeed a tick. Our son calls from an ambulance. He’s had a bike accident. He thinks he’s OK though his vision is a bit distracted by a persistent moire pattern. We can’t go and see him as traffic is gridlocked and it’s still raining. I’m on a two-hour call with a client when Tim goes out to get gas and the next shoe drops, there is no gas. The lines for the remaining gas wrap around the stations for miles in all directions. Our son is released from the hospital. He’s OK. Battered and high on pain killers. We eat dinner out and I charge my phone.

Later, we head to our friend’s home so that I can send out my notes from the call and then, as we talk, we notice my host’s eyes fluttering close from sheer exhaustion.

It’s been a rough week.

Back in the car, it’s now eleven PM and I’m feeling a mix of panic and optimism. It is late enough I reason that we’ll be able to find gas somewhere in the county. Surely, not everyone is still on the prowl.  We drive randomly down the highway, becoming painfully aware that we’re burning our finite gas as we search in vain to refill. Our strategy quickly morphs from find a gas station with no lines to simply find the gas station with a line because that means there is in fact gas. Police cars line the front of the stations telegraphing both a sense of order and heightened panic what with their flashing lights and all.

We give up and head home. I’m at my lowest ebb, convinced that the lessons I should have learned about how to survive the Nazis have eluded me. Why didn’t I see this coming?

We see a gas station with flashing lights ahead. Tim asks the cop if indeed there is gas and the Cop unbelievably waves us in. We’re confident as we scan the rear view mirror that the next guy in line will beat us up. A big beefy guy with fat knuckles. Instead, the Cop sends everyone else home. We’re the last to gas up.

We go to sleep feeling the warm hand of luck waving us forward.

Ridiculous how that one stroke of luck reassures us.

One has to wonder if this is simply a case of tunnel vision as seen from the perspective of the East Coast post crazy ass Hurricane Sandy (and who chose the name Sandy, one wonders, a name without a hint of menace?) or if this is actually the beginning of the long slide towards 12/12/12 where life as we know it will end and this ending, which formerly was pictured as a pop, a bang, a distinctive event (come on, admit that this was always the way you imagined it) might be in fact a long sputtering close that began the day the storm barreled up the Eastern Seaboard taking with it our power (not metaphorically, you understand but rather the plug in variety), that favorite beech tree and peace of mind. Hard to say.

Had an amazing dinner at a friend’s home with power and were cast among two other couples both of whom are now homeless. One family’s home is condemned. They’re living at a local motel nearby, trying to plan out the next year which now looks very different than it did a week before.

We woke up to quiet. Improvised breakfast cause we still had gas.Took the dog for a walk in the woods and hiked around bramble and broken trees. Just out of curiosity, we headed up the slope towards the homes cresting the top of the hill. Four homes with trees crashed through their roofs. The Insurance Adjustor and the Contractor huddle with the Homeowner who amazingly enough is able to form sentences and tell us her story. She moved her husband’s car from the driveway to the front of the house where it was perfectly positioned to receive the full brunt of the falling oak. She laughs and moves on.

Some people say that a crisis brings out the best in people or the worst. I’m always impressed when people behave like adults and know how to move forward.

It rains on and off all day. We cook the rest of our food. Barbecuing steak, chicken, meatloaf. What do we eat first before it all goes bad? The holiday spirit starts to ebb and we find ourselves ravenously hungry for the news as my iPhone battery dies and evening falls.

There is a fire drill over a scheduled conference call. Not until it’s discovered that the phone lines are dead does the call get rescheduled.

We head to a friend’s home for dinner, soak up the love and drink too much wine.

Before the power went out, there was a sense of anticipation, honestly. Excitement. A break from life as we know it. I felt compelled to grab my notebook and capture the “meme” that is crisis weather TV coverage. Couldn’t help myself. There’s the action map tracking the storm. It’s on its way and it’s bad.

The storm is a field day, a gift for elected officials who finally are being asked to step up to the mic and behave like leaders. They don’t know their script and so they have no choice but to simply be themselves and urge people to evacuate. Governor Christie takes to task the residents of Atlantic City who remained. Tells them clearly that no rescue will be attempted tonight. “Head to higher ground” he suggests, resorting to the language of films like Towering Inferno. As if by ignoring his advice those who remain are getting what’s coming to them as darkness falls and scary takes over.

The poor hapless Anchor who has to keep the broadcast humming through the frantic flood of information and the inevitable lulls. The crazy Field Reporters buffeted by the howling wind, stand with their backs to the angry ocean yelling into the mic (what might motivate someone to sign up for that job?). Two young giggly girls step up to the camera. They’re holding a mangled stop sign that was ripped from its metal pole. To them Sandy is a holiday. The Anchor chastises the Field Reporter asking “where is your Mother, girls?”  A person surfs, rides the wild waves behind another Reporter, prompting the Anchor to again demand that the Reporter “find out who that is”?

The new language around Category A areas. The blaring klaxon and red flashing lights. Peoples’ homes condemned. Who knew NYC would ever flood?

The thousands of stories that are baked into each moment like a Sunday Special all-you-can-eat banquet. An estranged couple forced to ride out the storm together. The Mom who doesn’t quite have a fully developed “entertain the youngsters endlessly” muscle. The Field Reporter who lives to stand by the edge of the raging ocean. The crazed gambler who rolls the dice hoping that the odds are in his favor (her favor) but spends the night on a long ride of survival. Dawn breaks and the rescue crew can be seen cresting the horizon. The Shelby Mustang owner who simply can’t leave his car to fend for itself in the garage. After all, he just got it a few months ago and he has great plans for a road trip. And yes, he did name his car after his first girlfriend in sixth grade.

And then the images began in earnest. First Southern Jersey and then Lower Manhattan. The shots of Van Brunt Street in Red Hook turning into an angry river, the same streets where we studied the vacant lots with longing just a few weeks before, thinking maybe we’ll live here or here.

The lights flickered. We cooked like crazy. In anticipation of losing power, we turned off first the lights, then the TV, so that the actual power failure sounded more like a psst than a fatal thump.