Where I was when the lights went out

It’s a Tuesday evening in November, 58 years ago.

My family is home. My mother, as I recall, has cooked “soft steak,” consisting of meat in gravy and maybe some onions. Years later, I can still smell and taste it. My younger sister still knows how to make it. It’s especially nice if you place a piece of bread underneath the steak and gravy.

At some point after dinner, Father Smalley from St. Vincent’s, our parish, is coming over to talk to my mother about something. Although he’s never visited our house before, I don’t have the impression that anything is wrong.

At 5:22 p.m. our power goes out — lights, TV, everything.

Turns out we are among 30 million people, from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, who are literally and figuratively in the dark.

Were we in the middle of dinner? Maybe, maybe not. I do recall candles being brought out and lighted. And someone turning on a transistor radio; one of the radio stations is still broadcasting, on “auxiliary power.” Not that this does much good; nobody at the station seems to know what happened either.

We stay calm, and after maybe two hours the power comes back.

And we’re still expecting Father Smalley.

Father Smalley is an assistant pastor at St. Vincent’s. He’s a young, pleasantly down-to-earth guy whom everybody seems to like. My mother knows him because of his involvement with the parish’s Mothers’ Club, and they get along well. Father Smalley’s boss is Father Hearn, the pastor, a much older man who has an unpleasantly acerbic and not particularly funny sense of humor. A few years later, when the hippie movement takes hold, Father Hearn will refuse to give Communion to a boy who has long hair. (He’ll also give me grief for sporting long sideburns, which I have grown mainly to prove to the other guys that my chemical makeup really does include testosterone.)

Father Smalley is also into show biz. When it’s time to stage the parish’s variety show, he is the auteur. When “folk Masses” come into vogue, he introduces them to St. Vincent’s. I don’t know how Father Hearn reacts to this, but I’m sure I could guess.

Not long after Father Smalley arrives he talks to my mother. He has come to ask for her help. Every Tuesday the kids in our Catholic school get out early and kids from public school come over for religion classes that are taught by volunteers, all women. Thing is, some of these women are also mothers and need baby sitters, so Father Smalley is asking my mother, who is in the process of raising six kids, to let one or two of the women drop their children off at our house and baby-sit them while their mothers teach. My mother agrees to this.

But before Father Smalley talks to her, and in an apparent attempt to break the ice, he looks at me and immediately, apropos of nothing whatsoever, launches into a letter-perfect rendition of “You’ve Got Trouble, My Friends, in River City” from “The Music Man.” He’s no threat to Robert Preston, but he isn’t bad.

Father Smalley will eventually leave St. Vincent’s, leave the priesthood, move to San Diego, get married and become a fundraiser for nonprofits.

And I will always remember the night of the soft steak, the blackout and the transistor radio, with a show tune thrown in — no cover charge.

Just another night in the Murphy household.