A life in light.

Chasing the glow.

I came to love a dim room early. If memory serves me, my mother favored lamps, and lots of them.

Returning to my childhood home these days, my parents vital but undeniably aging, I can’t help but think: these overhead lights weren’t there when I was a child - were they? If they were, they couldn’t have possibly been this bright.

When I look back, the images wear the wash of nostalgia, bathing my youth in the amber bath of a low-wattage iridescent. I prefer that picture.

In college, my best friend and I won the choicest room in the freshman housing lottery. It was triple the size of a typical dorm. The acreage offered freedom to two teens, and we didn’t want it to go to waste.

I forbade the harsh glare of the overhead light. We dotted lamps about instead. It was where everyone wanted to be, screaming over heated matches of FIFA on Playstation or talking about music over shitty canned beer. It was my first taste of entertaining. Welcoming friends was a great feeling. I credit the lamps.

Around the same time, I started working in restaurants to make spending money.

A restaurant is a nice place to learn about lighting. A dim room, thoughtfully lit, encouraged conversation, tucking in, leaning forward, like floating on a little raft with your tablemate. Nothing flatters like a candle flame burning drunkenly on the table.

The day after graduation I packed my car and drove to the nearest big city. After moving into my first apartment, I headed to Target to outfit the place. I still have the small silver lamp, though the bulbs are long dead.

At our home in Charleston, we have 21 lamps on the bottom floor that must be turned off, one by one, before we go to bed at night. This doesn’t count our Noguchi paper lanterns, which are just big lampshades hanging from the ceiling. Make it 23.

Most of these lamps sport appliance bulbs, an impossibly dim (so, perfect!) 5-watt bulb. For what appliance? I can’t figure it out. Oven, maybe - or a microwave. Do microwaves have lightbulbs?

They seem too dim even for that job. They’re the lowest wattage I can find and therefore my favorite. They provide enough light to discern basic facial features but not enough to illuminate words on a page. No reading can be done in this kind of light. Only heavy drinking or sex.

In the last few years, my local hardware store has been phasing out these old bulbs, replacing them with supercomputers dressed up as lightbulbs. You operate them through an app. I stocked up on my go-to, but the end is neigh. Iridescent bulbs are dying, LEDs are flooding the market.

Fortunately, I found Tala. They’re your classic London-based lightbulb outfit, making handsome, dimmable LED bulbs for people who care about this kind of thing. OR Satco’s Vintage Amber LED. Put them on a dimmer, take ‘em low, et viola. I was finally soaked in that soft, sweet light of a 2500 or less Kelvin dim-to-warm bulb.

Then, the city fixed the long-dead street light on our block. Its harsh, arresting light illuminated our corner like never before, pouring into our living room after sunset, ruining my hard work. I contemplated selling the house - it was too goddamn bright.

For several weeks, I considered my options. Should I write a letter to the power company, and plead my case for coziness? Could I shoot it out? I don’t own a gun, but surely I could do the job with a strongly primed BB gun. Did I know anyone with a ladder tall enough to reach it? Not sure what I intended to do. Wrap it in an amber theater gel, perhaps - the kind used to suggest nightfall on the stage. I considered wrapping the light in duct tape.

We started pulling the shades at night instead, blocking the street light and cocooning us inside our syrupy glow. In a dim room, the evenings take on a bit of occasion. Even the dullest conversations are underscored with a sense of possibility.