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Stormy weather here: Maybe a third of the way into photography class the lights go out in the Arlington Career Center. Instantly it becomes very dark in the photography wing, this part of the technical high school not being designed to admit a lot of natural light. It remains so for maybe a minute before the generators and emergency lights come humming on.
There is little to do in a dark room when the lights go out (perhaps a small irony) so most everybody stops working -- for my part I just have a partly-exposed roll of film developed but still rinsing in the sink. One of the students, a German embassy employee, brought cake for his birthday (that being the tradition in Germany, so he says) so the instructor gets paper plates and plastic forks and we share that around. An older gentleman, a friend of the beginning-class instructor, is there to show us his collection of Minox spy cameras -- he was partway through his show and tell when the power cut out -- so instead he tells us some of his life story: he was born in Estonia; his family went into hiding when the Russians invaded prior to WWII, eventually fleeing to Finland by boat in the late 1940s (his father, a fisher and sometime navy man, "just looked at the North Star and kept sailing towards it"); the family moved from there to Sweden, then eventually to Canada where his father had some friends. From there he segues into a description of his 37-year career with Boeing in Philadelphia, and how he began collecting miniature cameras when he ran out of room to store box cameras. We can hear the louder peals of thunder crunching through the walls and ceiling of the classroom. A different texture to the evening than usual.
By the time I'm outside the rain has mostly let up; it's still early enough in the evening that there's light to see by. One or two dramatic bolts of lightning some distance off in the sky. Once I drive back up to US-50 the traffic signals are on once again; a good sign. At home the electricity never stopped.
There is little to do in a dark room when the lights go out (perhaps a small irony) so most everybody stops working -- for my part I just have a partly-exposed roll of film developed but still rinsing in the sink. One of the students, a German embassy employee, brought cake for his birthday (that being the tradition in Germany, so he says) so the instructor gets paper plates and plastic forks and we share that around. An older gentleman, a friend of the beginning-class instructor, is there to show us his collection of Minox spy cameras -- he was partway through his show and tell when the power cut out -- so instead he tells us some of his life story: he was born in Estonia; his family went into hiding when the Russians invaded prior to WWII, eventually fleeing to Finland by boat in the late 1940s (his father, a fisher and sometime navy man, "just looked at the North Star and kept sailing towards it"); the family moved from there to Sweden, then eventually to Canada where his father had some friends. From there he segues into a description of his 37-year career with Boeing in Philadelphia, and how he began collecting miniature cameras when he ran out of room to store box cameras. We can hear the louder peals of thunder crunching through the walls and ceiling of the classroom. A different texture to the evening than usual.
By the time I'm outside the rain has mostly let up; it's still early enough in the evening that there's light to see by. One or two dramatic bolts of lightning some distance off in the sky. Once I drive back up to US-50 the traffic signals are on once again; a good sign. At home the electricity never stopped.
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