All cats are black in the dark.

When I checked my phone messages from work this afternoon, there were three from my mother. I hadn't realized that the blackout had spread as far west as Lansing, Michigan. I'd heard that it was just (just!) New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. But no--southern Canada, Ohio, Vermont, and so on. And of course my folks are in Detroit. So my mother left me a message to call my father at work--she couldn't reach him, since the phones were all jammed up, but she could call out to the west coast--and tell him not to come home, but to stay at his lab, which boasts a generator.

I thought that was sort of a funny thing to say. It was like, "Honey, don't come home! Stay with the generator where it's safe!" Perhaps seperated from the generator, my father might weaken? Obviously whenever something like this happens we are all forced to recognize our dependence on our fragile little creations, but it started me thinking about electricity as something more; not only tool, but safety blanket.

If you were home alone in a swiftly-darkening apartment with no a/c that you'd climbed nine stories to get to, would you want your spouse to stay away just so they could be someplace where the lights worked?

I got her message too late to call, and he went home and they were fine. Eating some fully pre-cooked food that would otherwise spoil. She tells me that the cats are having a rough time of it. "They're walking to the bathroom two by two," she says. "Don't ever tell me again that the cats don't need a nightlight." She is also struck by how quiet the building is. People aren't hanging out in the hallways because there's no outside light and the halls are pitch black. No music, no televisions. People are driving around outside, but the main light is that of moon and stars and the little red lights on the neighboring television station's antenna. Earlier in the evening the smell of grilling food--lots of grilling food--was strong everywhere. My mother was able to find two regular candles, a box of hanukkah candles, and a box with several kinds of batteries, none of which fit the flashlights.

Mom has never been good at sleeping in the dark. I hope she'll be okay tonight.

The news she had been hearing when the electricity went out is that the results are back from my father's needle biopsy, and the cancer is back. The Strange Mass Mystery has been solved. We'd been hoping for TB, which sounds weird--"I hope my dad has tuberculosis!"--but as mom points out, TB can be cured.

The doctor wants to start a third round of chemo. Moving on to Taxotere, which is supposed to be gentler side-effects-wise than Taxol. My dad's irked because his hair had just came back. Mom has told him that they'll go for passport pictures before the new round starts, so his passport won't make him look like Willem DaFoe in Shadow of the Vampire. Next year the three of us are trying to go to Israel.

I sat with him a couple of times during the first round. I went home for three weeks and cooked calorie-laden foods because the doctors told me to, potatoes and cheese. Butter. Milkshakes with Ensure or tofu worked in. Cut up cold fruit for the times his throat was too burnt for anything else. Every morning the three of us would get in the car and drive to the radiation clinic. Once a week it was the chemo clinic next. Each woman on the support staff had been issued an American flag T-shirt and a letter instructing her to wear it a certain number of times a week to show her support of our country. This was right after 9/11. I'd go into the room with my dad and sit in the next chair and watch the electronic portion-control device count down how much stuff was going into him. He usually slept through the whole thing, and I'd find myself talking to the other patients and feeling a little selfconscious that I had hair.

Watching him sleep, I realized that he was traveling in a foreign country. My dad, whose most exotic destination has been Canada. My dad who used to say, "I don't need to see those places myself, if I can read about them in your letters." My dad who finally admitted that he wants to see Africa, the Great Rift Valley. Go down the Danube in a boat. See Israel before he dies. In Tokyo, in Ueno Park the month after I went home, I hung an ema in a shrine and wished for his health, wished he could see the layers of thin wooden plaques for himself, the drawings of rabbits and dogs and lucky snakes.

I see him loping along in some strange place, a sepia photo under a layer of wax.

He is traveling in a foreign land, and he sends postcards, but I cannot go to him there.