A farewell to a lamp

It was getting late, and it was time for our children—and us—to go to bed.I was turning out the lights in the living room, and I reached to turn off the floor lamp. But as I tried to turn the switch, I realized the lamp looked crooked.

That’s funny, I thought. Has it always been a little askew?

Then, as I turned the switch, the lamp started falling over onto my arm. I caught it and realized there were bits and pieces of the base spread all over the floor. The base had completely deteriorated, and the whole lamp was collapsing.

You might think I would have noticed sooner that the lamp was disintegrating before my eyes. I have been walking past that lamp dozens and dozens of times a day, and there was significant debris at the base. But I think there may be a poorly understood condition called Quarantine Brain that makes it possible to forget or not notice completely obvious things—things you would never overlook on an ordinary day.

These aren’t ordinary times.

Anyway, the lamp fell over into my arms, and I called for my husband to come and remove it from the house. Then he vacuumed up all the bits of cement that had fallen out of the base.

Did you know lamps had cement inside the base? And cardboard? Well, this one did. Is that a sign of a poorly made lamp? Or are they all made that way? I may never know.

We’ve had that lamp for most of our marriage, and it has traveled with us from apartment to apartment to home to home. John and I think we got the lamp at Boscov’s more than a dozen years ago when we lived on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. That feels like a lifetime ago—that time when we were newlyweds without children, wondering what the future held.

Sentimental as I am, I have to admit that I’m not particularly sad to see the lamp go. It has served us well, and as I consider what our budget was in the first years of our marriage, when we saved every receipt in a box, I’m sure we’ve gotten our money’s worth out of it. It was a fine lamp, but it was relatively nondescript. If you tested me, I’m not actually sure I could pick it out of a lamp line-up.

Still, I find myself walking into the living room and reaching to turn the lamp on, and it isn’t there. And I find myself thinking that I don’t really miss the lamp.

But I do miss its light.

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