When the big blackout of 1977 hit, I was visiting my aunt and uncle in Brooklyn. They lived in a large apartment building, and I was there with them and my cousins when the lights suddenly went out. When they did, we ran to the terrace to see if it was just our building or the surrounding ones as well. From there, we could see whole sections of the city as they blinked out. It was wild. Not just a few buildings at a time, and not the whole place at once. Instead, big chunks of NYC went black one after another.
We then spent the blackout more-or-less trapped in the apartment. It was a high floor, so no one wanted to go outside. While the walk down might have been tolerable, the walk back up the stairs would have been a killer.
I saw some interesting things during that involuntary confinement. The people in the building were actually rather resourceful. Some on the lower floors would fill buckets with water lowered from the upper floors by people stuck there.
If you're wondering why they would need to do this, water in tall buildings is drawn from tanks on the roof. To get there, the water is pumped up to the roof. No electricity, no pumps. No pumps, no water (at least not after whatever is on hand when the lights go out is exhausted).
It was an interesting event. One of those breaks in the regular flow of life by which we may mark a moment in time. So we found the shirt. It's of no real use to me. It doesn't hold cherished memories of Mom, and I'll never fit into it again, no matter how well the diet goes, but it serves as a reminder of one of life's interesting moments.
4 comments:
July 13. August 14. Could the next one be September 15?
*jaw dropped*
1977 - i wasn't even born!
Gee, thanks Wayne! Now I really feel good! :P
:)
What a very cool artifact you found!
I had a similar t-shirt experience some years ago: It was time to move into a house to start my first job, so I went through a bureau to clear it out for moving. I pulled out one of the drawers, and saw something had fallen behind it ... it was a t-shirt from when I was much younger and Mom managed a t-shirt shop.
I shook out the wrinkles and noticed something remarkable. I had always just thought that the printing on the shirt was merely an open window ... and that somehow, that was the visual joke. But suddenly, years later, I saw the real p oint of the graphic: small and in the distance, the USS Enterprise was orbiting above the trees! I never noticed it until I had become a Trekker.
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