When policemen still wore shorts

“Wah, you must have bought this when police­men still wore shorts”, said the lady at the light­ing shop as she asked for my per­mis­sion to dis­man­tle some more of the tiffany lamp I brought in for her to fix.

As took the base off, the debris from inside the lamp fell out and dirt­ied her table, and I felt bad, until she told me it would cost around $100 to fix up the lamp and bring it into the 21st century.

I’m not com­plain­ing too much, because it’s a really nice lamp my mother bought in San Fran­cisco in 1979 or 1980, and it hasn’t worked prop­erly since. (Prob­a­bly because we didn’t know the dif­fer­ence between AC and DC, and we prob­a­bly melted the fuse or something).

And this lady’s shop was only like the sev­enth or eighth I walked into on Balestier Road, and the only one whose occu­pants didn’t say, “No, we don’t do repair. Only sell. Try other shop. Sorry”.

Then again, it was quite likely she knew how to fix this lamp, because her shop had sev­eral sim­i­lar lamps, although she said, “Those dif­fer­ent. All from China, not brass one”.

The lamp and some other stuff in the house should be ready by end of next week. Yay!