Super Powers

Have you ever been on a date, or in orientation, or in some other social situation where someone feels the need to ask one of those asinine getting-to-know-you questions? You know, something along the lines of “If you could be any vegetable, what would you be?” I hate those questions. I usually just pull something out of my…ah, hat, and then the other person walks away, thinking he’s discovered a profound truth about my inner psyche. The fool.

My all-time least favorite question is, “If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?” Honestly! I am awkward enough around strangers. The last thing I’d ever want to do is to have dinner with someone famous. And dead? Talk about pressure! If I’m going to go to all that trouble of raising someone from the dead to have dinner with them, I certainly don’t want to worry that I’d bore them back into the grave!

There is one question, however, that I’m dying to be asked, but so far no one has asked me: “If you could have any super power, what would it be?” If someone asked me that, I’d be thrilled beyond all reason, because I could finally, finally say, “Well, actually, I do have a super power. Or at least I used to.”

I think it was in middle school that I first noticed that streetlights would go out as I approached them. I paid little attention to this phenomenon at first, figuring that our town was so poor that the gerbils probably got tired running in their wheel-generators. Besides, I didn’t get out much. But in college, walking home late at night from the library, I couldn't help but notice that as I approached each light, it would go out, and it would turn back on as I walked away. Every single light. It got to be annoying, walking home in the dark. I had to buy a flashlight.

Still, I spent years believing that our nation’s streetlights were powered by a network of frayed wires and gerbil-generated power plants, until I complained about walking home in the dark to a friend, and she said it never happened to her. I spent approximately two seconds befuddled before gleefully leaping to the most obvious of conclusions: I had a super power. I could turn off streetlights. I was Electro-Girl.

Electro-Girl spent the next few years testing out her theory using the most rigorous of scientific methods. Could it be coincidence that yonder streetlight went out as she passed beneath it? Electro-Girl would walk back and forth, back and forth beneath the streetlight as it went on and off, on and off, on and off. She’d count the number of lights that went out and calculate averages – 80% on some nights. She’d measure the distance between herself and the streetlight as it went off, and then again as it turned back on. She even spent many fruitless evenings trying to turn off streetlights at will, using her super brain. (That never worked too well.)

Maybe it’s just as well that nobody ever asks me about my super powers. I have a feeling they’d just think I was loony. We superheroes are misunderstood. But I have company. Go ahead and Google “streetlights go out” to read accounts by believers and scoffers alike. And then take a walk with me at night, and come to your own conclusions.