Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

After 13 days without lights, electricity, heat and hot water, your house becomes a pigsty of mystery. When the lights finally flicker to life, you get to see your wonderous cluster fuck of a living situation bathed in glorious incandescence. Hurricane Sandy: Accuweather Power Outage from Space In our house, clumps of dried leaves had rubbed themselves with great vigor into every square inch of carpeting. Understandable. When you cook pots of coffee, 10 pounds of freezer waffles and a 50-pack of half de-thawed mini party weenies on the grill, that's a thousand trips in and out the backdoor. I didn't even notice our indoor nature fest due to the pitch-black-darkness problem and the working-during-daylight problem. But even if I had noticed, it wasn't like anything was going to happen. Vacuums do not run on D-batteries. We found a fleece jihad in the bedroom. Rejected items littered the perimeter-- goggles, a broken pole strap, half a trail map and a pile of...

Bryant Avenue by 167th Street, but not in 1955. Pop grew up on Bryant Avenue in the Bronx: "I never saw a real tree until I was maybe 13. There was this large vegetation out front our building that I thought was a tree. But then my mother broke the news. It wasn't a tree, just a big bush."