The Lamp

My dad struggled a bit with school. He once told me that he had Rheumatic Fever as an eighth grader, missing two whole months at the one room, country school he and his siblings attended. He said he felt like he never caught up. Nevertheless, he graduated from Bloomfield High School in 1951. 

Dad was a sophomore when he met my mom, an incoming freshman, and the two of them clicked immediately, despite their differences. She was an outgoing cheerleader who lived in town; he was a quiet farm boy. She excelled in school, while he had to work hard to pass some of his classes. She walked the few blocks to and from school everyday. Dad and his older brother, Lee, drove an unheated Jeep the ten miles to and from their isolated farmhouse. But in the winter, when the harsh, northeastern Nebraska weather made travel difficult, they boarded with an older woman in town, recalling, in later years, how she never gave them enough to eat.

Like most teenage boys of that era, Dad took a shop class in high school, learning how to make furnishings out of wood. He used a lathe to fashion vases and ash trays, as well as three beautifully-turned lamps that he wired himself. One of the lamps, and an ash tray, resided on my maternal grandparents' end table as long as I can remember, eventually returning to Mom and Dad when Grandma moved to Assisted Living. Mom's younger brother, Gary, used another lamp in his bedroom for most of his life, and the third one was eventually placed on a nightstand in Mom and Dad's bedroom.

Mom undoubtedly helped Dad with his school work, but I think Dad's shop class also made high school more bearable for him. Looking back, I think he may have had dyslexia or a similar undiagnosed reading disability; although he read newspapers, he never read books for pleasure, and rarely read aloud to any of his children or grandchildren. In addition, he always used an adding machine and, later, a calculator, when he was keeping books for his business, and was always thought to have excellent business sense. But dyslexia may have affected his written math skills, too, since numbers might have appeared to be backwards or misplaced, just as words do for people who have dyslexia.

I didn't really remember that Dad had made all three of the wooden lamps, and several other wooden items, until my brother and sister and I began to sort through the miscellaneous stuff in Mom and Dad's basement after they both moved to the nursing home. Since there were three lamps, we each brought one home. Mine sits on my bedroom nightstand, where it does the job it was meant to do nearly eighty years ago, when Dad made it.

I was turning the lamp off this morning when I suddenly realized something: Dad's family didn't have electricity in their house until he was eighteen years old, so the lamps he made in high school were totally useless for him and his family. He kept one lamp in hopes of being able to use it someday, but the other two were gifted to my mom's family because they lived in town, where every house had electricity.

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.

Ecclesiastes 9:10a