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A Touching Tale

The Source

I have one of those touch lights. In fact, I have several around the house. You merely touch them and they light up. An organization called Junior Achievement went on a light-making binge about twenty years ago and started turning discarded items into lamps. My favorite is an electric meter than spins around measuring the current when the light is tapped on. Our local chapter of JA is now defunct, and I think that the only tangible achievement of these juniors was making these lamps. Perhaps the real achievement was selling them to their teachers. It’s one of the few real conveniences I have in my home. Most everything else is decidedly inconvenient. I chose not to purchase one of those clap-on, clap-off lamps. Being the only person living in my house I’d feel silly standing in a darkened room and applauding. They now make lamps that will come on when you enter a room. I think that’s just plain spooky. Bill Gates has a home like that, but he still uses pocket protectors. Can I trust someone like that? Come to think of it, I think my electric meter lamp may be more like 30 years old. I was at Grace Methodist a few weeks ago and saw the kid who sold it to me. He looked really old, and when I shook his hand nothing lit up. Maybe that’s why my faithful touch lamp has started getting weird on me. I keep it at the head of my bed and after reading for an hour or so each night I reach up and tap the base, happily plunging myself into a dose of Arenzville darkness. Then the strangest thing happens…not every night, but often enough to concern me… the light will come on. I’ll lie there mentally conducting the New York Philharmonic or walking down a Caribbean beach with Halle Berry, and the light will come on. I didn’t touch it. I didn’t move (other than to save Halle from a roving land shark), and I certainly didn’t want the light to come on. Bottom line: the light is growing defective but I just hate to part with it. I’ve purchased many touch lights over the years and they’ve all gone cablooey by one method or another. This one somehow deserves to live, no matter how it’s faltering into old age. My microwave was surely one of the first invented. I think there’s still a hole in the back of the cabinet where the original owner inserted a crank. If the Schwan’s packaging says to zap the frozen broccoli for five minutes, then I’ll need to double that. When the directions on the frozen cinnamon buns say, “Wattages may vary,” they really have no idea how low that spectrum can go. I’ve thought about staging a small tournament between my stove and my microwave to see which appliance would heat a chicken leg the quickest, but I’ve forgotten where I put my stove. I think it’s under a pile of unread mail. An eighth-grade boy stood in my living room last week trying to sell me pies for his school fundraiser. I’m known as the easiest touch in town so on some evenings my porch is a veritable assembly line of tiny salespeople. Since I’d bought magazines from his older sister, Christmas candy from his younger brother, and discount coupons for his baseball team, I could hardly turn down yet another offer for something I’d never use. As I stood there thumbing through his pie-log, he said, “Wow, I’ve never seen one of those!” He was looking my television. “A television?” I said. “Such a little one.” I’ve got this problem in that I can’t make myself toss out something that’s working just because someone has invented a bigger one. When I walk after dark in Arenzville I pass house after house with mega-screens lighting up my village’s living rooms. Some are so large that I suspect the families also use them for furnaces. Frankly, I have no idea what I would do with a big screen TV. My eyes are still good and I have no need for the Channel 20 weatherman’s head to dominate my living room. I told the kid that my TV set was an antique that my grandparents brought west in a covered wagon. He said, “Cool!” He was not the smartest pie salesman on the block. I know a lovely couple from Winchester who are simply hilarious in the way they bicker. It’s all good-natured but both of them were blessed with bitingly wicked wit. When someone asked her why she didn’t trade in her old dishwasher she said, “My husband’s been more useless than the dishwasher for the last twenty years, but I don’t have the heart to toss him out either.” I’ll keep the touch light at the head of my bed and if it keeps turning itself on in the middle of the night, I’ll wake up and tap it into darkness. When you come to my estate sale and buy it, I’ll be genuinely touched.