Easing the Passage of Time, Part One

Ok so you are probably wondering what we did and have been doing in the dark, especially in the days right after the storm. Well, I already mentioned tea and red wine, didn’t I?…

I will parse out tidbits of the fascinating activities in several stages…here’s the first.

Lucy has a big fridge and a large freezer compartment on the bottom. She is an occupational therapist so her trade is helping people figure out ways to do ordinary day-to-day things easily with a lots of interesting and common sense techniques that most lay people would never think of.

She made a snug little igloo out of ice cream, ice trays and freezer packs, then with the precision of a microsurgeon she arranged our few precious perishable commodities in an arrangement that would be the envy of those who created the Mexican monument at Teotihuacan!

We had some milk, oj, butter, salad stuff and some nice cheeses I’d stocked up on at Whole Foods including a great piece of parmigiano. Also some chicken from a rotisserie chick all nicely cut up into little pieces. So all were nestled in their chilly bed waiting to be parceled out meal-by-meal, day-by-day. After a few days, even though it was still pretty chilly in there, it got colder outside so we started to put food out on the deck. We realized we’d have to do portion control as the days went on without power and we channeled our inner Chilean miners and parceled out our meals, also cooked with flashlights tucked under our chins.

Lucy had made brownies the night before the storm and we had an Entemann’s golden fudge cake and a Shop-Rite lemon pudding cake — things I never buy but it was an unusual shopping expedition that day. We tut tutted about paying $6.49 for that Entenmann’s but — as the days dragged on — it turned out to be an excellent investment in carbs!

Our Sandy snacks

All this organizing and thinking about it and double-checking the freezer (to the raised eyebrows of the chatelaine who was irked at opening and letting hot air into the precious ice chest) took a long time and was the subject of a lot of discussion. I can see your eyebrows rising and your eyeballs rolling.. Well, you weren’t here!

Lu also has an ancient boom box that she dragged out: a curious artifact that takes big round batteries that I haven’t seen in ages. So we listened to NPR especially and love Amy Eddings, Brian Lehrer and John Shafer. On two nights John had back-to-back shows featuring music about rain, storms, hurricanes, water, etc. He asked for listener recommendations so Molly and I sent him an email suggesting Levee Town (Sonny Landreth), Stormy Weather (Eartha Kitt), and Have You Ever Seen the Rain (Creedence). He didn’t play them but maybe next storm he will.

Did I mention that Lucy is some kind of amazing genius who also has the pulse of the American consumer? She also has a terrific sense of how things work — bear with me here. I’m about to make a point.

Ok, I was lucky enough to receive some fantastic NJ lottery tickets from my brother Jim and his wife Betty Lou in September. Ordinarily I would not admit this to anyone outside my immediate family (as they know I have certain cognitive limitations in common sense issues) but I will confess that I hadn’t scratched off the Lucky Bingo Tripler, Win for Life, Great Big Bingo, or Super Crossword tix because I just couldn’t figure out how to do it (yes I know you need the edge of a coin, but that’s not the point). That was more than six weeks ago. Molly also wasn’t sure about these particularly complex tix so I thought that this enforced time together would be the perfect opportunity to find out how many thousands of dollars I’d won.

We’ve been asking Lucy to do it with us all week because these things come so easily to her — she is the practical equivalent of being double jointed and able to do turnouts if you are a dancer —but the sun went down so fast (yes! Amazing isn’t it?) that believe it or not we never had time in the first six days of post-storm activities.

Isn’t it extraordinary to think that the Egyptians built their monuments, Aristophanes, Piero and Chaucer created their masterworks, Shakespeare wrote all his plays, Pasteur and his wife… Well, you get my point — all without running water and electricity! Lucy says, well they all got up at dawn, used every minute wisely and laid out their clothes for the next day before sundown…

Well, watch this space because tonight’s entertainment is the lottery ticket scratching exercise — like the horseshoe throwing contest, 3-legged race, egg on a teaspoon marathon — a new entry in (with all credit to W.H. Auden) easing the passage of time.

Enjoy your evening!

Family

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