At precisely 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, Jan. 30, the power flickered off at our house.
The night lights pulsed three times and the smoke detector in the kitchen chirped once, like the last mouse jumping off the Titanic.
"Great," I thought.
Like thousands of mountain families, we found ourselves last weekend buried under a sheet of ice with no electricity. Feeling suddenly sick, I burrowed under the covers.
Meanwhile, my 3-year-old son sat up in bed. "Mommy, Daddy, I want to go play in the snow," he announced.
"Go back to sleep," the rest of the family commanded him in unison.
By 8 a.m. the house was cold and the kids were tired of playing Sorry and eating Pop-Tarts.
"Did you ever notice how quiet it is without power?" my wife observed. "No TV, no video games."
Soon, we bundled up the boys and joined a stream of people fleeing the mountain, an event that will go down in history books as the Great North Face Fleece Migration.
We fled, as middle-class refugees do, to that citadel of civilization, the shopping mall -- where 30-percent-off-already-reduced-prices helped drain our stress away, while the boys bopped around a plastic playground.
By midday we were ready to head back up the mountain, hopeful the power had been restored. As we arrived at the entrance to our neighborhood, our 8-year-old son was the first to spot the carnage.
"Uh-oh, Dad," he said, lookout out the window of the Subaru. "Some trees fell on our house."
"SOME trees?" I said, and suddenly I saw a pine and a maple resting on the roof over our master bedroom like a giant, two-stick Popsicle.
"OK," I said. "That's a problem."
Meanwhile, neighbors reported that while we were gone a nearby transformer had exploded like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July. In the distance, trees snapping sounded like cannon fire.
Quickly, we packed our bags and made a hotel reservation downtown, bribing the boys with the promise of an indoor swimming pool.
"Think of it as an adventure," I told the guys, who were clearly rattled by the whole ice-storm experience. "Twenty years from now, you'll remember the day the trees fell on our house and we stayed in a hotel."
Instantly, the boys scattered to find their swimsuits, which were buried in the back of their underwear drawers.
Later that night, as I drifted off to sleep -- my family safe in our Hilton refuge -- I couldn't help think how privileged we are in America.
In the Third World, if a tree falls on your house, you have no house. Electricity is illusive or nonexistent.
Here the middle class live like kings. Here we have a ice storm, and we call the insurance man, eat a nice restaurant meal and visit a hotel sauna.
I wonder sometimes if our children appreciate how blessed that we are in America?
Heck, I wonder if we adults do?
Kennedy is the content editor of the Times Free Press Life sections and writes the “Life Stories” column. Previously, he was the first Sunday editor of the Times Free Press. Before Chattanooga’s newspapers were merged in 1999, Kennedy was the coordinating editor of the Chattanooga Times, where he had previously been an education reporter, feature writer and team leader. His first newspaper job was as sports editor of the Cleveland (Tenn.) Daily Banner. Kennedy’s human ...
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