Let There Be Light!

There's this lamp on my mind--a little lamp with a little beaded shade you might've found on a cabaret table in Berlin in the '20s--that caught my eye my first year at San Francisco State. I was riding the bus home, and there it was on Mission Street, right in the window: the light of my life.

I must've passed that thing a hundred times before I finally went into the shop one day and asked about it.

"It's a Tiffany Lamp," the woman told me sternly. "It's $300."

I wanted that lamp so badly. But of course I didn't have the three bills to flip for it.

Twenty-one years later, I still remember what that lamp looked like. And even more, I remember how bad I wanted it.

I wanted it more than I had wanted anything so impossible.

Until now.

Now, I'm wanting something terribly badly and terribly impossibly.

And if it happens to happen, the first thing I'll do is order that little red Tiffany Lamp I've already found online.