May a Lamp Brighten Your Days

Do not drive into my carport. It is the only place in Linda Vista where you will be run over by a lamppost instead of the reverse. Out there leaning against the wall is a nine-foot-tall wrought-iron lamppost, topped by a four-sided lantern and curlicued with brackets. I am afraid this warning will hold true for a year or so.

It will be at least that long until my son, Timothy, gets around to borrowing a big enough pickup truck to take the thing back to some acreage he and his wife have bought in the desert.

They have dug a well. They are having electricity brought in. They are talking to people about easements and all those awful words that mean you have become a member of the American gentry who are homeowners, or at least builders. Their faces are drawn. Their eyes are rolled back. They jump at sharp noises.

I wanted to get them something for Christmas for the house, or rather, for the bare land surrounded by mountains and the Salton Sea. Patsy decided to join me and we decided to have a wrought-iron lamp made.

May I tell you it is not as simple as getting a cordless rechargeable razor. Wrought-iron people do not have them. They make them up. I wanted one seven feet above the ground. That means a nine-foot piece of pipe so that two will go down into a hole someone has dug. My son is a reading teacher and instructs adults who can’t read, and good for him. But sometimes it would be nice if he were able to do some of those do-it-yourself things that sound so helpful.

I found a wrought-iron craftsman in the Yellow Pages and went to find him in his Highland Park foundry. Do not try to go to Highland Park unless you have studied advanced tracking. There is a street named Marmion Way that wanders through Highland Park, like a fitful mountain brook, crossing and recrossing railroad tracks, going up and down hills, even going past the sign saying Mt. Washington.

By the time I had spoken to people who addressed me in four languages and I replied with my non-subjunctive English, I came home to Pasadena, somewhat chastened.

I called him back. He told me his name was Sam, which was easier for me than Sebouh Jaklian, his real Armenian-Lebanese name. He screamed through the phone, “You didn’t come to the pastrami place.”

“Sam, this is the first time you have mentioned the pastrami place,” I screamed back.

He said he would meet me at the pastrami place but not before he had loudly and clearly related the directions that had proved worthless the first time.

I finally found Sebouh (Sam), and we picked out a piece like this and a piece like that to weld together to make Tim’s lamp so that the first thing he puts on his desert acreage carries the light of welcome.

Sebouh is really a musician. “Music is my life,” the iron craftsman says. He works in iron so he can play on weekends. How sad that we almost passed each other without my knowing that this young man’s love is the piano. How nice to have a scrolled lamp made by a man who hears music instead of the clang of iron.

Thursday is the beginning of a new year and we all get to do it again. I do hope things go a little better. As my dear Armenian friend Jessie Kaprielian says of anything sad or hurtful, “May it all be in the past.”

To each and all of you a Happy New Year, success to Sebouh in his new world and crack a magnum at midnight to greet the new year. And as for any sadnesses that remain or those things that wake you in the night with your heart pounding, remember what sweet Jessie says: “May it all be in the past.”