I called the realtor this morning and thanked him for the gloriously dark night last night.

I just looked: there is a light left on, but it is muted as if on the far side of the house and with no direct line of sight between bulb and us. That’s so much better than how things were that I’m not going to complain.

Karma reminds me of the time when we woke up at the usual hour in the morning to a message on our answering machine from next door: Sandy was pleading in vain with us to wake up and turn that thing off somehow.

One of the charms of our late ’99 Chrysler minivan was that about every 18 months its alarm would totally randomly start blaring, and when it did it would keep on going till you–get in the screaming car that first time, run through the owner’s manual, go why??, scramble back out, put the key in the driver’s and only the driver’s side door, twist it the wrong way, hold, let go, quick do it again–and at last blessed silence.

Of which there was none that night for Sandy, her visiting son and daughter-in-law, and their young triplets who were all having to get up at 3 a.m. to catch their flight to Thailand.

I’ve written about the day there that they were going to go to the beach, but somehow it just all fell apart and they didn’t go…And then how Sandy was gone a month past when she was expected back and everybody was worried. Had anyone heard? No.

She had decided an older white woman driving one of the relief trucks into stricken rebel territory wouldn’t be shot at by anybody’s soldiers during the aftermath of the tsunami they had just just missed being swept away in at Phuket.