I saw a monarch butterfly today
A creature like a little painting that takes flight
Little more than air and art
That’s a bit of a non sequitur, so here’s the real story: I found a lamp the other day, set out near the curb by a neighbor a few doors down. This same neighbor once set out a garden hose, a good 100 feet of it in two sections, and who can’t use some extra hose for those hard to reach yard places. Tell me: who can’t use some extra hose? So I took it home, but it’s prone to kinking at any minor twist or turn. I swear at it frequently. I see now why it was put to the curb.
This lamp though, it’s heavy brass, a floor lamp that is the perfect thing I didn’t even know I needed. I replaced the light bulb, plugged it in, turned the clicker and it did its job marvelously when called upon. I sat it in the corner of my small 3-season porch at the end of a loveseat, where I’ll now have a softer light to read by in the evenings.
All lighting methods are not created equal, like this ceiling light which casts obtrusively far into a space from on high and hides nothing. Whereas this lamp seems to create its own space, a comfortable smallness that draws you in, fading before it finds the fullness of the room. This lamp, maybe all lamps, feels like an invitation. In any case, there’s often no need for the excess of a large and lit room in the late evening hours. Such light isn’t necessary for these smaller tasks, after the sun sets and the crickets chirp in darkness unseen, while acorns fall from the oaks.
This lamp has me thinking.
I once went to a museum that had an exhibit of chairs and the history of chairs. All throughout the place were representative samples showing important moments, I suppose, in the evolution of chair design. Office chairs, reclining chairs, rocking chairs, wooden and leather and plastic and metal chairs. It was fascinating, these pieces of comfort and utility created by people throughout history dedicated to the work of chairs. You couldn’t sit in any of them, of course, which seemed exceptionally cruel at the time.
So this lamp and that memory have me thinking that I would like to visit a museum with an exhibit of lamps. Stained glass and brass, floor lamps, lamps for end tables, piano lamps, electric and kerosene. The New York Historical Society Museum has its Gallery of Tiffany Lamps, that iconic stained glass lamp that has been replicated to more affordable success over the years. But the originals will set you back. The ‘Pond Lily’ lamp on this page of Christie’s auction house sold for nearly $3.4 million in 2018. I’ve heard of having “f*ck you money,” but truly, having lamp money like that must be something. You gotta get that lamp money.
But lamps need not be expensive, and the history of lamps is fascinating. Just a peek and you learn that remnants of lamps at least 70,000 years old have been found by archeologists: hollowed-out rocks filled with moss dipped in animal fat. I could never make a Tiffany lamp, but I’m just smart enough to make a moss-burning rock lamp.
Since I’ve found this lamp, I’ve come to the conclusion that a lamp might be the best invention humans have conceived. And a lamp and a chair: no combination we’ve ever drawn together could be better.
How is it that I’ve lived so long and never given much thought to lamps (though I’ve always enjoyed them)? Not until I found this beauty by the curb. For free. A gift likely to give again, and again, and again each evening until its bulb or mine goes out.
As a friend recently said, “The curb provides.”
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