eric@ericnagler.com I’m in a terrible fix, in a foreign country with a broken computer which has already stolen a day of vacation. I’m sitting in a cyber cafe e-mailing this from a keyboard with upside down question marks and strange keys in the familiar places.

Mr. Editor, you’ll have to do your magic because I also can’t count the words. I feel so helpless without a laptop. It reminds me when we got blacked out for four days a few weeks ago (while the armed forces invaded Shelburne to practice emergency maneuvres... how ironic).

My partner loves blackouts. She goes into apocalypse mode, breaks out the candles, puts kettles on the wood stove, fills the oil lamps, empties the freezer and buries boxes of perishables in the snow.

For me, a blackout is a disaster. One hour of laptop battery and then ... what? For her, a blackout is camping. For me, camping is anything more crude than a Holiday Inn.

But we sat around the kitchen table, talked and played with the wax. I told a story about when I was a kid and how every Friday at sundown my grandmother, who sometimes seemed from another planet, would retire to the corner of her room, drape a handkerchief on her head, light three candles and sway back and forth like a sapling in the wind as a quiet gibberish flowed from her mouth. My sister and I had orders to leave the candles strictly alone but as soon as Grandma went downstairs we’d gather up the melted wax to fashion snakes and rings, press coins in it to play the grand vizeer, and generally worry the candles the way a cat worries an injured mouse. I told the story as we sat in the flickering glow with no TV to distract nor CD player ... in fact, no sound at all. The younger ones at the table (actually they were all younger) wondered what it must have been like before TV, and I recalled sitting in the living room around the giant radio and watching it as if there were a picture. But of course the picture was in our heads... except my father’s head. He seemed to have no imagination whatsoever.

He hated the Jack Benny show (which the rest of us loved) because, for example, Jack would be scratching away on the violin and Rochester would rush in asking if the cat was sick. There would follow a long silence while

the audience’s laughter would build and we’d roar right along imagining Jack’s reaction ... except my father,who would stare at the silence. He never got it and what could we tell him? You had to be there? He WAS there! Ironically, when we finally got TV in the late 1940s, The Jack Benny Show was my dad’s favourite. “So THAT’S what the silence was all about!”

As I finished the story of Jack Benny we were startled by a soft bubbling from the hallway. Diana was the first to realize, “It’s the fish tank.” And strangely, after four days of frigid silence, I felt regret as the fridge whirred into life, the light switches flipped, the heat came back on, and the wax slowly hardened around the snuffed candles.