The Lamp
My Grandfather died July 4th, almost twenty years ago.
As we cleaned out his home, we sorted possessions into three groups: things to keep, things to donate and things to discard. While moving the furniture out of a back bedroom, I took a hideous looking tiffany desk lamp and placed it in the discard pile. My Mother laughed as she saw this and asked how I could possibly part with such an heirloom. She pointed out how the plastic looked almost like tiffany (if you squinted just right). For the rest of the day we joked about that lamp as we carried various real treasures out of the house.
At one point, some wise guy even moved the silly lamp into the back of my truck. As we were about to leave I removed “the lamp” as it became known, pulled down the door and locked it. We said our goodbyes and each headed our different ways towards home.
Later that night as I backed into my driveway I put my hand behind the seat and it bumped into “The Lamp.”
Of course my two brothers, two sisters and our parents all denied knowledge of how it managed to get into my truck. I was pretty sure it was Mom, but she was sticking to her story. I put The Lamp into my basement and forgot about it.
Several months later I was rummaging around the far corners of the basement looking for something when I unburied The Lamp. It had seen better days. The plastic tiffany shade that had been cracked by the family member who stuffed it behind the seat of the truck was now starting to lose all structural integrity.
In a flash I knew what needed to be done. I grabbed a roll of duct tape and carefully taped The Lamp back together. I then placed it in a box and wrapped it in the best Christmas paper I had. The finishing touch was a beautiful bow and a card reading “To: Mom, Love: Jon.”
You can imagine her surprise during our family’s Christmas party as all of her children watched her open this fine gift. It gives one great satisfaction to pull off a practical joke that took months to consummate. I am sure that my Mom felt that satisfaction as I opened a box containing The Lamp the next year!
So, this is how family traditions are born.
For the next several years The Lamp went back and forth between my Mother and me. And each year The Lamp showed its age more and more. At some point my Mother created a scrapbook of pictures documenting the journeys of The Lamp.
One year The Lamp was in such disrepair that my Father placed all of the remaining pieces in a handmade wooden box. That same year he decided to give each of his kids an “opportunity” to take The Lamp home. He locked his wooden box with a small lock and gave each of us a key. Of the five keys only one would open the lock. As the father of a five year old, I let my son choose a key for me. You should have seen how proud he was to “win” The Lamp for another year!
As the years changed, so did The Lamp. The lid to the wooden box was replaced with glass turning it into a shadow box, which later grew legs so that it became a table. Throughout it all the only constants were that the light bulb still worked and that we all had fun trading The Lamp.
One year the unthinkable happened! My sister was living in Hawaii and stored the lamp in her shed. It turned out the handmade box, now picture frame, now table was a delicious treat for some pacific insects. The Lamp was a total loss! The only thing that could be done was to salvage a few pieces of plastic tiffany and burn the rest. My sister carefully collected the ashes and placed them in a gold painted coffee can that was adorned with the remaining pieces of plastic.
She gave me The Lamp’s urn that Christmas. It was a fairly somber event. The tradition had ended, and frankly it was a shame. We had all grown to look forward to the giving of The Lamp, even if we were thrilled when we didn’t get it. The urn lived on my piano all year as a somber reminder of The Lamp’s passing.
As Christmas approached my darling bride told me “You’re an Electrical Engineer. The Lamp has always lit for Christmas. Get down in the basement and don’t come back until you have that thing working!”
Cannibalizing an old bedside lamp I managed to re-light The Lamp. It looked like your average bedside table lamp, if your average bedside table had a gold painted coffee can under a cheap lampshade. The tradition lives on, The Lamp lives!
Over the years the cheap lampshade was replaced with a disco ball that later sprouted fiber optic “hair”. And a new ‘rule’ was made that The Lamp had to sit proudly in the caretaker’s living room from Christmas until Thanksgiving, at which point the caretaker could begin to make modifications to it.
In its current incarnation The Lamp is five foot tall with three multicolored lights under a disco ball sprouting fiber optic hair. A series of spotlights adorn its trunk and neon tubes sit atop them. And the whole thing is now sound actuated so that the louder you are the more the lights flash!
But if you look closely you will see a gold painted coffee can full of ashes adorned with cheap plastic pieces from my Grandfather’s tiffany lamp.