I am not usually superstitious.
When using a ladder around the house, I don’t hesitate to walk under it, even if a black cat just did the same.
And I change my socks daily, regardless of whether I’ve written a good column in the previous day’s pair.
But what happened to me Thursday tested my disrespect for the supernatural, even as it made me a (still unsung) hero of the near western suburbs.
I came home from work that evening knowing I should really, before bed, start writing my column about the PBS show “The 1900 House” (8 p.m. Monday, WTTW-Ch. 11, and succeeding Mondays).
I was planning to do some kind of period piece about the delightfully quirky and imaginative program that follows a British family living, for a quarter-year, as though it were the turn of the last century.
It is the one reality series in this summer of same possessed of a spirit more inquisitive than competitive, making cheerful, characteristically English digressions into, for instance, the histories of poultry and indoor plumbing, even as it gives us the usual bevy of examples of character revealing itself under pressure.
Thursday was a hot day, though, and before settling down at the computer, I set off for a nice, old-fashioned walk, with stops planned at the cleaners and convenience store. Would they have sarsaparilla? I dared not hope.
En route, I chatted with a woman about the historic, publicly owned home on the stoop of which she was sitting. We agreed that it would be a fine thing if restoration efforts inside were stepped up. Then she asked me a provocative question: “Do you have power?”
I had never really thought about it in such naked terms. A little embarrassed, I stammered out a noncommittal answer, one, as it turned out, entirely inappropriate to her intention.
Electrical power, she explained. Several towns immediately west of the city had been plunged into darkness, or would be plunged, once the sun finished going down.
Suddenly, on the night I was supposed to start writing about “The 1900 House,” I was living in The 1900 Village. Cue spooky music. If not a full-length documentary, there’s got to be an “X-Files” episode in that, or at least a “20/20 Downtown” segment.
Back in my house — built, eerily, in 1904 — as I contemplated an evening of candlelight and spoiling cheese, I achieved a new level of empathy with the Bowler family of “The 1900 House.”
Fortunately, I had watched the tape a couple of nights earlier. Moments that I had then seen as darkly comic started to seem more somber: three adolescent girls without enough hot water to bathe, the history-buff mother who had led the family through the application process being the one who has a mini-meltdown in the second of four episodes.
Things were not, of course, as difficult for me and mine. The Bowlers faced three months of living without modern conveniences, including the big one of electricity and all the work-saving gadgetry it makes possible. I had Commonwealth Edison on the case, and so figured my power would be out for a week, tops.
They had to use, day in and out, an underpowered c. 1900 stove, not only to cook but to heat their water. I had to remember where I’d put the flashlights.
They had additional hardships. A laundry process that took a full day and was just a couple of steps removed from using rocks and a river. A cabinet full of the patent medicines of the day, though not the ones containing cocaine or heroin. Three outfits per member of their six-person family, an allotment determined, as in most of the show’s close attention to detail, by what was typical of a middle-class Victorian household.
The children — the three girls and one, younger boy — were allowed to change into modern clothes for school but had to change back on returning to the home, in a London neighborhood.
The mother, Joyce, had taken a leave of absence from her job to stay true to the tradition of stay-at-home women, while the father, Paul, reported to his military job in a full period dress uniform, though with no mutton chops.
And it would go on for 90 days, with virtually the only thing non-Victorian in their home lives being all the cameras nosing about the house.
In the first hour of my own adventure in time travel, the neighbors had spilled out onto their front porches and lawns, conspicuously keeping refrigerator doors shut as we fed the neighborhood mosquitoes.
The occasion became an impromptu block party, albeit one at which the competence of Commonwealth Edison was called into question even more than is usual.
The sense of togetherness in hardship echoed what the family in “The 1900 House” had found, that one side effect of all our conveniences is the possibility of isolation. For all the tension and turmoil the Bowlers endured — and they endured a lot, especially in the realm of shifting personal hygiene standards — they had to come together in both work and play.
In my temporarily electricity-free home, I was reminded, in a very visceral way, of one of the show’s central lessons: how much has changed and how thoroughly we take it for granted.
I thought about all the things I might have done that night that I would be able to do either not at all or only with considerable effort: read, watch TV, do laundry, open the garage door to put the car away, or — and this saddened me deeply — start working early on the column.
I surely would have discovered more, but — and here’s the hero part, for which people can now start thanking me — I went and got the power turned back on for me and all my west suburban neighbors.
I did this the most efficient way possible. About two hours after the lights went out, I drove to the supermarket to get ice cubes.
When I returned with eight bags ($12.72), I found, of course, that, yes, I did have power.
Sorry, wrong numbers: In my column Friday urging CBS to stay the course with its 10 p.m. news experiment at WBBM-Ch. 2, I was working with what turned out to be a bad number from a usually reliable source, and I failed to check a second source. So I wrote, incorrectly, that the station’s Monday-Friday 10 p.m. ratings were down 19 percent from last May to this. The correct figure is a not-quite-as-dramatic 13 percent. My apologies for the error.
