On Love and Lamps

blogging about my feelings again

I bought this lamp at goodwill, it was a banker's lamp and I’ve loved banker’s lamps since I was a kid. I think they are so simply elegant and kind of funny. I saw it and I was like, oh yeah this is my lamp, it's perfect and I can’t wait to have it forever. I was really excited. I bought it and brought it home. It had real glass on top, and I was able to buff out a lot of the imperfections on the gold metal base, not all of them of course because you have to leave some to give it a little character. When I was finished cleaning it I set it on top of the left speaker of the record player in my living room, where my old lamp was before. The base of the new lamp was a little too big to rest fully on the speaker but it almost fit. I took a new light bulb from the hall closet and screwed it in and turned on the lamp. “Pretty!” I thought, and I turned it off. When my roommate got off work later that day I showed it to them and, moments after receiving praise for my thrifty eye, my leg got caught on the power cord and I ripped the lamp down. The glass hood shattered on the ground. The light bulb, however, is unbroken and I’m not gonna move it to a different lamp. I picked up the pieces and saved them and someday I will go buy a hot glue gun or glass glue or something and I’ll put it back together. Right now I’m still too mad at myself that I let it fall in the first place. I only had it for a couple of hours, I had only turned it on once. I had left the power cord hanging out. I had placed that wonderful lamp on a shelf it didn’t fit on, on a shelf the old lamp had fit on just fine. I had overlooked the possibility that this lamp might not work in the spot I had put it. And I know that people are not lamps, but I know I can be careless. And it’s not the first lamp I’ve broken. And when I really like a lamp sometimes it's hard to find the right place to put it so that it can sit comfortably and illuminate the room when it gets dark. I’ll probably let the green shards of glass sit in the corner of my room, in the back of my mind, for a while because I’ll forget to deal with it and one day I’ll probably step on one of them and I will feel like I knocked it to the ground all over again. At the end of the day it was an accident.

Your favorite agent of absentmindedness,

Roxy

PS I’m gonna post more ugh writing is hard. This is the lamp btw.