Every house I grew up in had a drawer nobody organized. Rubber bands, a screwdriver missing its handle, matchbooks from a restaurant that closed before I was born, and candles. Plain white ones, the kind that come in a box. My mother never explained that drawer. She didn’t have to. A house that keeps candles is a house that has made its peace with the world.
I thought about that drawer a great deal during the February storm, when millions of Texans lost power for days. I want to say the next part plainly, because it deserves to be said plainly. Hundreds of Texans died. They were somebody’s parents and somebody’s children, and every one of them should have lived to see the spring. I pray for their families. No column, this one included, is worth a single one of those lives, and I will not pretend otherwise.
What I want to write about is what the rest of us did with that week.
Some people came out of it wanting answers. They wanted hearings and reports and somebody’s name at the bottom of a page. I understand the feeling, but I didn’t share it. I came out of that week wanting a better drawer. I bought more candles, a heavier blanket for every bed, and a little camp stove I keep on a shelf in the garage. I didn’t need to know who was in charge of the power to know I never wanted to depend on them again.
That is the lesson I took, and I still stand by it. A man who demands answers from the system has handed his family’s safety to the system. A man who buys candles has kept it for himself. One of them stays angry and the other stays ready, and I know which one sleeps better.
I remember sitting in the dark with my wife one of those nights, listening to the house tick as it cooled. We talked more than we had in a long while. We read by the light of one candle, and we prayed for our neighbors. I’ll admit I didn’t go knock on their doors. It was cold, and I assumed they had their own drawers.
People ask me whether it could happen again. I don’t know, and I’ve stopped asking. Asking is how a man ends up waiting on someone else. Not asking is how he ends up with a full drawer. I expect to vote for the Republican for Senate this fall in that same spirit, as a man who has stopped asking. My impression is that the other side still wants the answers, and I have made my peace with the drawer.
I keep the candles where my mother kept hers, and I check them every fall. I have never once called anyone to ask why the lights went out.
D. M.