Hello, Friend. I wrote the following paragraphs at my day-job office this morning about 10 o'clock. I didn't know that the electricity at our house was being restored as I wrote. I'm really glad to be back among all my email friends. David Ice an inch thick and more. Fallen tree limbs. Downed wires. The power went out at our house on Friday, April 4, about 9:30 PM. My family increased by a returning son and his wife and child. No light, heat, nothing electrical - or computerized. This morning our indoor thermometer read 41. No baths. No breakfast until we reach the bakery. We may have power by Thursday evening, 6 days later. What if this powerlessness lasts as long as it did the last time, in March 1991, when we were without electricity for 13 days! I thank God for Thomas Edison and for his many inventions (the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, the movie camera and projector, among many others). I thank God most of all for Edison and his gift of whole electrical systems for immense geographical areas, able to send electricity into the homes and factories and offices of this entire nation and the world. I pray that we may learn to maintain these electrical systems so that electrical service can continue uninterrupted. It will take more creative minds than mine to think of alternatives to the "telephone" pole or underground wiring. (But our phone lines never stopped working, in 1991 or now!) At the same time I realize that interrupted power is very instructive. It reminds me that "we are dust and that unto dust we shall return." My own personal dust is reminding me that I die partially every day. I have millions of dead skin cells that want to be washed away. We do have a gas water heater, and somehow it runs without electricity. I could take a shower, but the thought of drying off with a cold towel and stepping into a 41-degree bathroom persuades me to wait for the restoration of power. What else? Cold toilet seats. Frozen food spoiling. Our picnic cooler full of perishables on the patio. The blast of 25-degree air coming in through the open patio door when we retrieve something from the cooler. My tower of blankets and sleeping bags slipping to the floor in the middle of the night. Waking in the night and not being able to tell what time it is. Of course we have warm cars, work places, churches, libraries, shopping malls, to give us warm days. It is only the nights that carry us back to our roots. Think of our ancestors who lived and died before Edison's miracles gave us light and heat. And not only our 19th century ancestors. Think of our medieval ancestors, and those who lived under Roman emperors or barbarian chiefs. It takes this power outage to make me think of our remote ancestors, the hunter-gatherers and the early farmers of 4 or 5 thousand years ago. Or of those desperate souls who left Africa and set off for better lands searching for enough food to live, never mind the cold. Heat and its lack have been governing our lives here in upstate New York for almost a week now, but both heat and food and their lack governed the lives of those whose DNA we carry. It may be chilly and depressing here in Rochester, but sooner or later our lives will return to "normal." What a debt we owe to those remote fathers and mothers who lived whole lives of cold and hunger, bringing children into that dangerous world. I wonder if they ever thought of the lives of their children's grandchildren. Were they able to hope for more than their own lives? Did they ever think of their remote descendants? Did they thank their ancestors for surviving? Do we?