And six years after the quake, there was light
The lamp had never been sturdy. The previous owner of the house had sunk a pole at the top of the drive, soldered a light fitting to it and capped it with a home-made Halloween lantern. The thing shed useful light in winter but the earthquake did for it. It shook the lamp as a terrier shakes a rat, and snapped its neck. The lantern slumped to one side, held up by a single wire. It looked like a hanged man.
And thus it stood in sun and rain, a mournful memorial, a scarecrow that scared no crows, a lightless stick, for six and a half years while the earth went round the sun and the sun went round its corner of galactic endlessness, and the dog and I got older.
Bit by bit we patched up the rest of the earthquake damage, the retaining walls, the drive, the drains, the dog’s psyche, eventually even the house. By last week the lamp was the last remaining evidence of damage, the sole seismic souvenir. So I thought I’d have a go at fixing it.
When I sank my spade at the base of the pole it rang against concrete. But you don’t get to the age of 60 without learning how to break up concrete.
Is there any better accompaniment to a glass of red than the sound of a student swinging a sledgehammer? As I sipped I indulged in a little mental arithmetic. I was paying the student $17 an hour, which works out at a dollar for every three and a half minutes. He was striking the concrete every six seconds or so, or 10 times a minute. I was getting 35 bangs for a buck. It felt like a bargain to me.
After a morning’s work the student had shattered the concrete, extracted the pole, and dug back along the buried cable far enough to reveal rusted amateur connections that the electrician would enjoy tutting over.
‘‘Tut tut,’’ said the electrician on cue a couple of days later, ‘‘what cowboy put this in, et trademanishly cetera?’’ ‘‘Can you fix it?’’ I asked. The electrician chuckled and wondered out loud whether the pope was a tutting Catholic. He then laid new cable, made new waterproof connections, and told me that all I had to do was find a light fitting, and wire it up. ‘‘A breeze,’’ I said. In the hardware store I found a winsome lamp made in Guangdong to a design that might have shed light on Isaac Newton. Three wires protruded from its base. Now I was no great student of physics at school, but I do recall being told that George Brown was a live wire. Of these wires one was red, another black and the third yellow and green.
I pointed out the absence of George Brown to the store assistant.
‘‘We’re not allowed to give electrical advice, sir,’’ she said, ‘‘in case you try to do it yourself.’’
‘‘As if I would,’’ I said. I explained that I needed to know the colour of the live wire in case the professional electrician asked, to which she replied that she hadn’t come down in the last shower, so I asked what item of electrical equipment the professional electrician would be likely to use to wire the lamp to a cable and she said a chocolate box and I asked if I could perhaps buy a chocolate box now to save the professional electrician a journey and she laughed and said it was a free country.
The chocolate box proved to be a simple plastic junction into which I fixed the red, black and yellow-green wires. I then fed the electrician’s new cable up the pole and out the top, stripped away the plastic sleeve and revealed the three wires within. Of these one was green, another blue and the third was George Brown. This was wire as God meant wire to be.
But it presented me with a problem. After matching the green to the yellow-green I was left with a 50-50 choice for the live wire. Get it right and there would be light. Get it wrong and I’d have hair like Lisa Simpson. And I’d have to call the electrician back for some tutting mockery.
For the record I got it right. And after that, God was with me. The new lamp fitted neatly on to the pole, the concrete went in without mishap, the pole sat vertical in the concrete, and I spent the whole of yesterday evening turning the light on and off the better to admire my own effulgence. The earthquake at my place is now officially undone.
(And to any aspirant electricians out there, George Brown was a red Indian.)