Is it just me or are all-in-one, big-box stores, such the ones found on the Randall Road artery between I90 and Algonquin Road, having trouble knowing who they are or what they sell anymore? They’re like teenagers suffering perpetual identity crises.

My wife and I were huge fans of NBC’s hit show Friends. It brought us a lot of laughs the ten years it was on. And chief among those came from arguably the funniest scene in the show’s entire history, in which Ross enlisted friends Rachel and Chandler to help him move a new sofa up his New York apartment building’s stairwell. A quick synopsis: the couch was too long for the tight curves of the stairwell, which resulted in numerous failed strategies, and Ross repeatedly commanded his friends to “Pivot, pi-vot, PIV-OT!”

I had mixed feelings about power outages when I was a kid. All the rules changed in the dark. Dad said, “Don’t open the fridge,” while Mom lit candles, which were both spooky and mysterious, casting long, flickering shadows on the walls. My home was transformed into an eighteenth-century villa, and I wondered if this was what it was like before there were electric lights. What struck me as most sinister was how dark everything was. Not just dark…black.