Deedee noticed that the lamp had a small spot of discoloration on the side. She got the can of Ron’s Brasso that he used to polish his brass on his navy reserve uniform out to try to remove the spot. When that failed, she remembered an article in Hints from Heloise that suggested she try a mixture of salt and vinegar. She rummaged through the kitchen pantry for a moment looking for the bottle of white vinegar she stored for cleaning purposes. She vaguely remembered having run out of vinegar three weeks before and putting it on her shopping list but couldn’t seem to find it. Deedee decided that she must have forgotten to buy it and resolved the problem the way any good cook would handle the problem; she substituted. She got out the wine vinegar that she used to make vinaigrettes for salads from the pantry and mixed a tablespoon of the vinegar in a teacup with enough salt to form a paste, then she took a dampened paper towel and began scrubbing the moist paste into the side of the lamp. After a minute of rubbing, the mildly abrasive paste removed the spot completely. Unfortunately, it did such a good job that it made the rest of the lamp look dull by comparison. The spot she had worked on shown brightly while the rest of the lamp kept its dismal finish. Deedee scooped the balance of the paste out of the teacup and industriously cleaned the rest of the lamp. When she finished, she lay the lamp down on the newspaper she had used to protect the kitchen table and sat back to admire the piece. Ron walked in the room and said, “I finished mounting the new mobile you bought for the playroom, Honey. Would you like to come and see it?”
“I’ll be right there,” she answered and gave the lamp a final buff with the rag and wiped the dust from the edges of crystal mounted in the center of the lamp, “I finally managed to get all the spots off of the lamp. How do you think it looks?”
Ron bent over the table and looked at the lamp closely. The entire lamp seemed to be glowing as if there were some inner source of illumination. Ron tried to trace the patterns on the surface of the lamp and discovered that his eyes refused to follow the lines. The peculiar geometry of the lines made them look like they led off into another dimension that he wasn’t equipped to perceive. It gave him a dizzying sensation of falling into the arcane design that was inscribed into the side of the lamp. He blinked his eyes and looked again at the pattern. Taken as a whole, the design had a three dimensional quality that gave it the illusion of depth. It gave him the eerie feeling that the lamp was magickal. He shook his head to clear the dizziness that threatened to make him nauseous and said, “It looks beautiful, Honey! Are you going to put it on the mantle?”
“Can you think of a better spot for it?”, she asked him, then smiled and said, “Maybe I should put it in the bedroom so we could rub it and make wishes before we go to sleep.”
Ron chuckled and replied, “And what would my baby wish for?”
Deedee knuckled him hard in the ribs and said, “You know exactly what I’d wish for Ronny! I’d wish to be a real baby for twenty four hours. What a baby day that would be. I wouldn’t have to pretend then. It would all be real.”