Our efforts to prepare for the exhibit on Wednesday started out just fine. We had asked a handful of artists to participate with us in an inaugural show, and we were impressed by their enthusiasm. We sketched out a healthy to do list and got to work.
Logan was painting a local creek onto the wall of the stairway that I was sanding...
Radhika was painting a blue Baudelaire onto the door of a closet...
And we all took about forty trips to the Staples copy center within the course of the day to have our buddy Al print stuff for us...
A photographer from the New York Times even dropped by at the last minute, asking if he could add some stuff to the exhibit. Well alright!
It was hot, sure, but we had borrowed a bunch of fans and the fridge was stocked with sparkling water and white wine. Everything was looking great.
And then the electricity went out.
Since this happens a lot at our house, we figured we'd short circuited something. We started running around for awhile, grabbing our local electrician and, for my dad, one of those masks you wear when you're "at work"...
Every time I opened the refrigerator door to look with panic at the cheese in the slowly-warming fridge, someone told me, "CLOSE IT!" And I obeyed.
But it became clear that there wasn't much we could do to change things. This particular outage was not our fault. It was a city-wide thing.
As we celebrated our faultlessness, it slowly dawned on us that the electricity-free environment had brought an air of calm into the house. This feeling-- something between chaos and zen, is a familiar one in a place like Detroit. After all, this summer has been a festival of rupture and healing-- bike accidents, breakups, cross-country moves and graduations... If this city has anything to teach, it's how to live with lots of hope despite a feeling of uncertainty about the future. So, we stopped running around, and waited for our guests as we were.
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