Hurricane Sandy whipped through the East Coast on Monday and I was pretty worried about my family in New York.

My brother and sister both live on Long Island where I grew up. In fact both of them live very near the water, my brother further east than my sister. However, my sister lives just a few miles from what is called the nautical mile in Freeport Long Island.

I remember as a kid our dad, when he wasn’t fishing himself, spent a lot of time on the nautical mile buying fish from the great big boats that would pull in their daily. We went with him often and when there had been a storm the night before the street there were always flooded.

So when I heard on the news Monday morning that the storm was expected to really sock it to Long Island I called my sister to make sure they had battened down the hatches to ride out the storm safely.

Throughout the day I kept one ear peeled to reports about the storm and kept a regular check online to stay on top of what was going on, on the coast.

My sister called mid-day to tell me all was good at her house and that she was home with the kids who were out of school. We talked about how glad she was that the schools had called off school early enough to give parents time to plan who would stay home and what activities they would do with the kids who, because of the storm would be confined to staying indoors.

My brother, well I didn’t worry much about him since I knew he’d been preparing his home for the storm since last Thursday. He likes to stay ahead of things. I knew he and his family would be taken care of. And if they needed they would just pack up and fly off some where warm and sunny.

It’s really hard when bad weather or some catastrophe hits in an area where you have family and you are too far away to really help out. So you just spend much of your day worrying about how they are handling the bad situation. It was like that during 911. I couldn’t reach anyone back in New York and since my brother-in-law is a police officer I was really worried that he might have ended up in Manhattan and who knows what.. Cell phones were down that day and no one could reach anyone.

With this big storm blowing through, cell phones were down in New York Monday night too. It’s funny how with all the technology we have these days, that when disaster strikes we are forced to go back to the old-school basics. That’s what works. But kids today are so used to technology they are lost without it and they know nothing about using basic tools like regular old push-button phones. Yes I said push button. We are not even talking about rotary phones, for get that. To kids that would be like… prehistoric.

My sister told me that when the cell phones went out she dug out her old landline phone. An old princess push-button and plugged it in. Her daughter, who is 10, looked at her and said “what is that? “

My sister also pulled out an old AM-FM radio. When her son, who is 13, saw her putting batteries in the thing, he was like, “that takes batteries?” Too funny.

The kicker was when the lights went out, she had gotten down a bunch of candles. The kids were all flustered because they had no idea how to get the candles to stand in the jar tops. They couldn’t figure out that if you just drop some melting wax from the lit candle into the jar top and then as it cools stick the candle in it, the candle would stand up.

I remember when we were kids and a storm hit we did all those things without even thinking about it. I’ll bet the same scenarios were playing out between parents and kids in households all over New York on Monday. It’s a good thing that storm hit, just think what a teaching moment it is for families. Just think how many kids are reading by candle light or flash lights, because without electricity there is no TV or Xbox or computer. Just think how many kids are having to talk to their siblings and parents, sharing stuff they otherwise may never have shared.

Mother nature has a way of making us all slow down and take a moment. It makes us remember our blessings and that sometimes it’s the simplest of things, like a radio, a few candle and a family conversation, that make life rich.