Not quite darkness
This year’s Earth Hour has ended. Or, it has been passed along to the neighbours, barely tested. We could easily have foregone candles here; simply drawn back the shades and let the light from across the street bathe our living room in the extra lumens. But, any symbolic act remains just that, and my family now realizes how difficult it is to interrupt the daily train of activities, even for a simple sixty minutes on the hourglass.
At one point, I imagined myself as a hurdy-gurdy player. Busily cranking a small radio, with the song Jump by Van Halen as the fruit of my efforts, we heard Randy Bachman close down his weekly program with an exhortation to “live green“. I’d tried to prepare for the darker times by cranking the radio earlier, (not quite clear on the concept that the radio must be OFF to store any power for future needs). Now we know.
Son #3 wasn’t onside, either. He gave up in disgust after less than five minutes and took the dog for a walk. She didn’t say much, but her enthusiasm might lead me to dropping the power some other evening. The promise of chicken wings served as atonement, although he didn’t understand why I hadn’t done my cooking during his wasted hour. Oh well.
Four candles is more than enough light to read by, and I had a wonderful insight into stagefright from the recent novel Duma Key by Stephen King. There were no phone calls, and we left the computers to a needed rest period (for us and them). All in all, our observation of an ecological moment went by without major penalty (except for the Van Halen tune, but that’s another subject)
