A conversation with my mother yesterday on our weekly telephone call has left me a little less ambivalent about PG&E coming in to light our oven pilot. I’d been looking at videos on youtube about how to do it. (Like most online videos about home repairs that assure us “it’s easy and safe!” it didn’t look all that easy and safe to me, involving taking out the floor of the oven, using a long match which we don’t have, being careful to do this, do that, don’t do that other thing and for God’s sake, don’t forget to do that yet other thing…)

I mentioned to Mom our pilot light going out and said I remembered hearing about Dad relighting ours when I was a kid.

“Oh yes,” Mom said. “That was back when he was still at Tulane and we had that little apartment on Plum Street with a gas stove. The pilot would go out and your father would have to relight it.” She laughed. “Half the time we’d hear a POOF and when he stood up his eyebrows would be singed off.”

Then she reminded me of a family anecdote I’d forgotten, about one of my aunts trying to cook on that stove during a party and the pilot light going out. She’d called in one of Dad’s fraternity brothers to relight it and waited until he was bent closely over it and striking a match to tell him “I already turned on the gas, you know…”

I asked Mom how things were Western Carolina. “Crowded,” she said. “The Floridians are here.”

The area where she lives has been a summer resort for well over a century. Its population grows dramatically in the warm months and the pandemic has not changed this. For some reason involving tax rates and property, many affluent Floridians have houses there. She said that when she drives through downtown now, it’s bumper-to-bumper cars with Florida plates and the sidewalks are crowded with people. “They’re not wearing masks,” she said. “I do my shopping in Boone.”

Last night, on our weekly Zoom with friends, I asked for advice about the pilot light and was advised to tell PG&E we could smell gas in the apartment. “But we don’t smell gas,” I said.

“Say you do anyway and you won’t have to wait until next week,” Lydia said. “They’ll tell you to get out of the apartment. You just stand outside for a bit. They’ll be there in fifteen minutes to relight the pilot, and you can go back in.”

I think I’ll pass, given that PG&E is likely to be getting more calls like that than usual and I don’t want us to have to wait outside with the cat carrier for heaven knows how long.