Hard physical labor—splitting red maple for instance—a scarcity of news, a twenty-five-hour power outage, are good for the political soul. So was John’s heads-up on the Harris poll reported in the Wall Street Journal. What convention bounce? Any respectable incumbent president would have the opposition shaking in his donkey boots. Not this time.
Haven’t heard much news today, just word of mouth, which is kind of damn nice. Ivan took our electricity around five o’clock p.m. yesterday afternoon and hasn’t returned it yet. It is six o’clock p.m. now. Starting to get dark. We spent the night with candles and flashlights burning and at the ready. Couldn’t get our radio working on batteries. Some trees were knocked down in the neighborhood, a couple of big old red oaks and some Bradford Pear trees. Pockets of metro Atlanta still without power. Around 250,000 customers lost power last night.
I rode la bicicleta around the neighborhood (Anthony hasn’t picked it up yet). Rode out to the highway and talked to the linemen from Tennessee working for us here. They said power should be back on in about an hour.
Girls I’ve watched grow from babies to high school students stopped by and said the Georgia Power guy told them, “pretty soon.” Spoke with Doris across the street for about the second or third time since she moved-in seven years ago. She has a contract to sell her house. No electricity, no TV, no AC . . . makes a different neighborhood. We’re actually out there walking around, chatting for real, riding our bikes, having long conversations.
I told Vernard more about the history of his house than he would have imagined. Our friends Mia and Mike used to live there. They had a room just for their Western American tortoises, one for the lizards, horned toads, and other assorted desert dwellers, the pig owned the den, about twenty birds usually roamed on their own, the barking frogs were kept in the bedroom. The garage was reserved for raising crickets to feed the reptiles. Vernard remarked, So there was a pig! The exterminator told me about him!
Jane found some interesting hurricane stories archived by the Sun-Sentinel, Ft. Lauderdale’s newspaper. One lady in the early decades of the 20th century was nearly strangled by her own wind-whipped dress.
Only an hour left on this laptop battery. Sure could use a little electricity. It is six-nineteen p.m.
I ran out the battery on a Beatles record. THE POWER IS BACK ON, after twenty-seven hours! God bless them boys from Tennessee! We were yelling from the windows! Blowing car horns! Now let me go catch up on what I missed in the world.
Just got a heads up from my mole at a big Buckhead hotel: SE Legal organization of some sort, where Zell Miller is speaking tonight, has chatter about making moves against Michael Moore and his F-911 movie. Sorry if there are typos, I have pent-up need to blog.
