The Orange Lamp

I've been watching Melissa Etheridge play live on Facebook (6 p.m. EST) for about 10 days now. She gives a four-song concert every evening. She talks about how she wrote the song, plays hot guitar licks, throws in a day on the piano, and talks about taking care of ourselves during this time of weirdness. She advises us to drink water, take walks, be kind and fill the universe with love.

Hey, that's a message that I can get into. It's like stepping into her secret room and learning a lot about her. How very kind of her to do this for her fans during these difficult days.

Her concerts are taped in what looks like a little shrine room, where she has a chair, her Grammy statue, things she's been given or whatever that has to do with her career.

Beside the chair, is a lamp. Its shade is orange and fringed.

 

Melissa's orange lamp.

From the first concert, I have stared at this lamp when I wasn't watching Melissa play on the guitar. I swear my mother bought a lamp just like this one when we went to California in 1976.

We were on a family adventure, complete with extended family that included my grandmother and two young uncles plus the four of us, taking a cross-country tour to California. We were in a big van of some kind; my mother said it drove like a bus.

Anyway, in San Jose, I think it was, there was a huge flea market. Stuff everywhere. My mother decided she had to have this lamp.

We had to sit with the lamp and nurse it all the way back to Virginia, trying desperately hard not to break it.

Having succeeded in getting it back home safely, my mother put the lamp in the formal living room.

I hadn't thought of it in years, but seeing it in Melissa's room has had me wondering what became of this lamp.

My brother told me in a text that it was destroyed in a house fire that occurred in my parents' home in 1989. I was married and out of the house by then, and my mother insisted that only she and the ServPro people could clean her stuff, so I have no real notion as to what was and wasn't destroyed when the roof of the house burned off following a lightning strike.

But I guess that is what happened to the orange lamp.

(I never did like it; orange is not my color.)