Can Lamp Light Lead?
Walk in the door of Grandma’s house and the lamp was on the right. Elegant and regal in its hand-crafted, stained glass glory, it stood for 40 years on a hallway table watching who knows what history, who knows what stories, who knows what imaginings as they passed by. It was there in 1942 when Mom and Dad got married – turned on at 4 pm in the afternoon to light the way as LaVerne walked down the hall steps to wed her beloved Oscar in the living room. It was there two years later as Oscar came home from war, waiting and welcoming where few other folks waited or welcomed. It was there in the 1950s when I came to visit, first -born grandchild, 5 years old and spending summer days – dirty and dusty from playing beneath a mulberry bush in the front yard. It was there later in that decade watching over my grandfather’s casket as he lay in state – still ruling in death in his majesty over a household and community that had welcomed him from Alabama poverty into a struggling Black letter carrier’s privilege in Cincinnati.
The lamp was there. And its light was usually on. Gran Cornelia had gotten the lamp, she said, in the 1920’s when she was a young woman and had made sure it stayed close wherever she moved – when she married her first husband and watched him die, when she bore her first son and watched him Pullman, when she moved to Burdette, married a Postman and watched her family grow. The light marked beginnings but it also marked endings. It marked the start and the finish. It kept people honest and helped them see their better selves. It watched over a household that didn’t know how to watch over itself.
Now the lamp stands in our home. It’s there – radiant and lovely, watchful and magnificent… ever the reminder that nothing true can be hidden in the dark; nothing true can be kept from the light; nothing true can be ignored or overlooked. The light shines and so must we.
Has there ever been a transforming lamp in your life? Have you told anybody about it?
Be sure to read “Beyond Roses - An Obligation to Speak.”