Voices In My Head

I clearly heard my grandfather in my head this morning. When I reached over my desk and turned the switch and the click wasn’t the same, I heard him say, “They just don’t make things like they used to.”

Now, honestly, they don’t. My office desk lamp was the current casualty in a line of things that are not made to last as long as I think they should.* It had been a gift to me for high school graduation from one of my mother’s friends. A person nameless to me now. The lamp went with me to a year at Mizzou and did even greater duty providing the decorative impetus for me to outfit my first cubicle with red accents – stapler, incoming and outgoing metal baskets, metal pencil cup, desk lamp. Maybe even a trash can, the underneath of my first desk eluding me from this distance of time.

It was still doing duty at my current desk when the tragedy occurred. This is a great lamp. One hundred watt limit allowing for serious illumination then – when graphic design was key to my employment – and now – when my reading-glass-swaddled eyes need the boost of decent light. A weighted bottom so it can be contorted into any shape or direction. Metal-on-metal tension screws for fixing the direction of the arms and the shade.

My corded friend just recently had an appointment with my husband due to a small popping noise where the bulb met metal. It never smoked or sparked, and he was able to find and fix the problem very soon after begging me to unplug in before it “fried”. His words; pure drama.

Today it didn’t even make the right clicking sound as I turned it on, but I still went looking for another bulb, and, when that wasn’t the problem, I checked that it was plugged in. Little troubleshooting things that are in my electrical skill set.

I did not tear up when unplugging it from the wall, although I was tested by the voice and my sporadic attachment to inanimate objects. Instead, I took a deep breath and walked toward the dumpster. Where I instead gently placed it in the back seat of my parked car on a soft, folded sheet.

Home to my husband, where I promptly received “the look” when my intentions were made apparent. It was placed on the kitchen table – by me – because things in that location have a tendency to be dealt with over the coming weekend.

“Is it too much to ask that things are built to last?” I remember another grandfather saying, most likely over something greater than an inexpensive desk lamp. I can’t really say.

I am praying for a positive outcome from the impending surgery. Thirty years isn’t really so much to ask for from a desk lamp, is it?

My grandfathers wouldn’t think so, I just know it.

* STUFF vacuums. Don’t get me started.

p.s. Tell me you can’t see and feel its jaunty personality from these photos! Pixar Studios has nothing on my sweet little lamp. Heck, it’s older than their first films!

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