The Chandelier

From a scrabble player from the Tucker Scrabble Club, #392 (http://www.scrabble-assoc.com/clubs/roster.html#l_392_1), while I was helping her move, I have acquired a chandelier. I am estimating its date of origin to be the 50's. The biggest piece of this contraption is a round horizontal disk, shiny silver with some tarnish and rust in some spots, to which the light bulbs are attached, and from which the dozens of glass pieces dangle. Looking up at it you would see four circular rings of these glass pieces and beyond them the shiny silvery disk from which they hang.

The construction seems to be pretty cheap, and the wiring is old. The chandelier has been stored in a very dusty attic or basement so the glass pieces are dulled by a surface of fine Georgia soil, and I have been washing them off in the sink. Unfortunately I ran one through the garbage disposal, so there is going to be at least one gap. I hope the eventual owner will see this gap as a charming reminder of the development of this precious and admirable object, as a gap between the teeth of a child at age seven.

The glass pieces are attached to four metal rings, each by a flexible rusty wire with a solid stopper at one end to keep the glass piece from falling off, and a bend where the wire goes through a hole in the ring. The rings in turn are held to the disk by shiny metal hooks, four to each ring, that are attached firmly to the disk.

Each glass piece has a back side which is completely flat and the front face is formed in a beveled shape with a pattern of ridges leading to the center. The overall shape is an enlongated hexagon so seen vertically the waist is a little wider than the head or foot of it. The front has six faces which are decorated by ridges elegantly curved and converging at the center.

When the dust and soil are washed off, which happens easily with water, the glass surface is delightful to my eye.

The direction that the crystals are hung on the rings is not consistent. Someone has worked on the chandelier, disassembling it and then reassembling it partly wrong and then giving it up for a lost cause, I surmise. It's been confusing to work with it because I misjudged which way the majority were pointing, misjudged whether they all point in the same direction, but now I have decided they should all point with the back towards the center and the patterned side facing out. This will entail considerable effort since each little wire has to be straightened, extracted, reinserted, and rebent. Even worse, some wires are missing, and it will not be possible to duplicate the color of the rusted wires - I don't dare try to replace every wire! Too much work for this lazy writer - it will be difficult enough just to find short flexible wire pieces - this kind of problem can be solved by using christmas ornament hangers, or the wires that come inside of a twist-tie.

Then when I get it fixed up the future of the chandelier will still be in great doubt. Would it sell on E-bay? Will my girlfriend love it or hate it? If I give it to Goodwill would it end up in the trash? Does Atlanta have a Habitat store? Questions abound, with few answers .... the Great Spirit will decide.

While I am washing off the glass pieces in the sink, I am thinking about writing my resume. Writing a resume means projecting myself in the best possible light, leaving out anything bad that happened, highlighting only the successes, and supporting the highlights with an array of successes, still filtering out anything bad that happened! This is not a natural process for me. My natural process is to find things that are wrong, and fix them, and later mope about why they were wrong, and thus hopefully avoid such problems in the future. My natural process is not to be a marketer! Or my habitual process is not to be a marketer. My goal in writing my resume is to bring out my inner marketer. I heard secondhand a statement that any enterprise must spend eighty percent of its budget on marketing. That is a marvel to me. That would explain why things are so high priced compared to their cost. Smarter consumerism could lower that ratio.

There is part I have not told you yet. Yesterday I washed the disk, after removing the rings and the light bulbs. The wiring got some water on it. The wiring is not covered by plastic, but by a thick woven sleeve, so that helps date the fixture as being somewhat antique. It could even be worth some serious money! Antique Road Show here I come! (Maybe not.) I was reminded of a graphic artist who worked with me once, who had the grave misfortune of being allocated a keyboard which I had used for a period in the past, which was thoroughly infiltrated with disgusting bits of food and dead skin. She had taken out the circuit board and was washing the circuit board in the sink when I told her I didn't think that would work. It turned out the keyboard did not survive, and went into the trash - another $20 keyboard lost, another ounce of heavy metal in a landfill for some future form of life and intelligence to find and enjoy.