“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest ...

mouth – and what a
surprise. Inside the
chocolate was a cherry!
(How do they do that,
get the cherry inside?)
Then other goodies
surfaced. Peanuts,
cookies, cheesecake.
The cheesecake was in a
doggy bag, but I shared
it.
The food was long
gone before the waiting
was over. We were
trapped in an elevator
for five hours. Waiting
it out was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.
There was a tense moment when Max tried to
light a cigar. No, I didn’t bite him, but Loretta
did, to make him drop the cigar. And Mrs.
Jacoby was crying. I licked her tears away and
she hugged me so tightly I could barely breathe.
Help came eventually. They broke through
the wall of the elevator shaft and lowered a
ladder through the roof panel. They quickly
lifted Mrs. Jacoby up and out. The others
followed. Me they put in a sling. I was dangling
in midair (thoroughly undignified), but in a
moment I was on the landing of the third floor,
with Bernice and the others. Joyfully, we all
walked downstairs.
Boy, was it great to reach the street. But
how strange everything looked. There were no
streetlights or traffic lights or building lights –
only the headlights of cars and the light from
the almost-full moon. There were stars in the
sky! I thought stars were only in the country. I’d
never seen them in the city before.
There were mobs of people in the street.
Bernice asked a man, “Where were you when
the lights went out?”
“I was in the subway,” he said. “We followed
a flashlight leader along a catwalk, hanging
Homer knew his mother
wouldn’t let anything
bad happen to him.
onto the coattail in
front of us, like a line
of elephants trunk to
tail. Now we’re joining
the crowd waiting for
buses.”
Waiting. New
Yorkers, who were
always in a hurry, were
waiting this night. The
people in cars and cabs,
all as full as a teenager’s
jeep, were waiting
too, for without traffic
signals, vehicles were
mostly at a standstill.
Eric bought two flashlights (at outrageous
prices) and directed traffic like a symphony
conductor. We cheered him on as we waited.
Yes, we were still waiting, this time for
Mrs. Jacoby. In about half an hour she was well
enough to start the walk home with us. As we
walked, we got news from people with transistor
radios.
A boy (about Bobby’s age) blamed himself
for the blackout. “I did it. I did it,” he wailed. He
had been walking along, swinging a stick. He
had wacked the stick against a telephone pole –
and the lights went out all over town. The poor
boy ran all the way home.
An airline pilot over Kennedy said, “I saw
the airport. I saw the runway. I looked down
at my instruments, and when I looked up, the
airport was gone.”
A surgeon at Bellevue had to continue a
delicate eye operation for an hour and a half
under the beam of a battery-powered light.
“How was it at Bellevue?” he was asked.
“Great,” he said. “Ordinarily, the patients
can’t even get a bedpan around here. But in this
disaster, everyone is cooperating, everything is
working smoothly.”
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