the lamp

This little inebriate is my most treasured family heirloom.

If my house were on fire, this is the one item I would run back in to save. The little ceramic drunk hanging off the lamppost graced the bar in my beloved grandfather's basement in Ohio for many, many years, played witness to family history, survived many moves and is the keeper of the flame that is my childhood's memory.

Bars were a big deal in my family and my grandpa's was spectacular. It was the centerpiece of all extended family activity and as the oldest of five siblings, grandpa was the patriarch of our clan and he hosted all family get-togethers. He took his role very seriously.

The bar was long and wooden and could accommodate eight adults on the big old antique stools. It even had a round brass runner to rest your feet on and a spittoon which held 100s of matchbooks from every restaurant and bar in Ohio, New York and points in between.

The bar was well-stocked; three mirrored shelves were jammed with shot glasses and glass bottles of every shape and size, each filled with mysterious liquid in varying hues of amber. It had a sink and a massive, rounded refrigerator that was always loaded with beer for the adults and grape Nehi and cream soda for the kids.

Grandpa had a huge collection of painted bar glasses that had things like riverboat scenes on them, and politically incorrect themes like the little black Sambo glasses and naked lady glasses. He also had 100s of swizzle sticks that I now own. There are sticks with naked lady bottoms bent over the tops ("Bottoms Up!") and big fish, glass olives, swizzle sticks with little hotels on top of them, exotic birds, the names of cocktail lounges and long since bulldozed lakeside retaurants and bars from Michigan to Ohio. They sit in a glass on the window sill in my kitchen now.

In the summers, all the men in the family would get together and play endless rounds of horseshoes in grandpa's yard. They would smoke and tell dirty jokes and laugh and swear and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and bottled Miller High Life. My great uncle Bobby (grandpa's youngest brother) would always inadvertently hit one of his brothers with a horseshoe and there would be a lot of shouting and carrying on. He was a massive beefy man and he chewed cigars. He never lit them, just walked around all day with one clamped in his mouth. Uncle Bobby bore a startling resemblance to Babe Ruth and he had been a Golden Gloves boxing champion in the 1940s but his aim with a horsehoe was for shit.

All the women would wisely avoid the horsehoe games by gathering in the kitchen to cook and chat and swat the kids away.

My cousins and second cousins would all belly up to the bar, fighting each other over the bar stools. Grandpa would line up glass tumblers on the bar and shoot a little bit of seltzer water into each glass as we watched, riveted. Then he would drop colored tablets into each glass and ad more seltzer as we oohed and ahhed, watching the bubbling brew turn orange or purple or red. Those grape and orange fizzy sodas were the best I ever tasted.

At night we would run around catching fireflies while the adults lounged on redwood patio furniture in the cool evening air, the butts of their cigarettes glowing softly off and on like orange fireflies, dancing in the darkness as they talked and gestured.

After my grandparents moved to basementless-Florida in the 1970s, my Uncle Paul took most of the bar equipment and set up an equally impressive bar in his own basement where he held court for over 30 years. He sold his house and moved to Michigan five years ago and asked me to fly up and decide what I wanted from his house. He put everything I selected on a truck and had it shipped to my brother and me. I carried the lamp home on the plane.

The drunk is a sophisticated bit of 1940s engineering. One click turns his nose on. I don't turn it on often, because the red bulb is original to the lamp and I don't know how I would replace it, since a friend who is a theatrical lighting designer told me they don't make bulbs that size anymore. A second click turns the big "Bar" globe on. A third click lights both. Sometimes when I'm working late at night I turn the globe on and it's glow makes me happy.

Yesterday it rained and I stopped working early and took a nap. I dreamed that it was fall and we were all at Grandpa's house in Ohio and Uncle Bobby was getting the house ready for Halloween. He was taking all the light bulbs out of the lamps in Grandma's living room and replacing them with blacklights. I was playing hide and seek with my cousins and from my hiding place behind the sofa, I watched him snake his thick arm under a lamp shade and pull a light bulb out. He caught my eye and grinned, winked at me and held the lightbulb to his lips and whispered "Shhhhhh!!!" Then I woke up.