Chandeliers

Winter in Canada is enough to make anyone a little weepy--it's not that it's not beautiful, but it's also deadly, like being forced to stare at a sulky ice sculpture of Tilda Swinton for seven months of the year--but lately I've been pushed closer to the edge by the chandelier in my dining room. It's a poverty light. You know the type: in its most extreme form it's high to the ceiling, either a naked bulb or one of those 1970s frosted glass globes in which you can see the papery dried bodies of 1970s wasps. It gives a light that is also the light found in almost every motor hotel along the TransCanada or the US I-5/15/10. The kind that puts in sad context the crunchy shag rug, the bedspread that smells like someone else's feet, the TV with jammy fingerprints on the screen, the local phone book with the Escort pages dog-eared.

I'm not saying that the chandelier in my living room reminds me of Pocatella's ladies of the night--not exactly, or at least not every time I look at it. But it makes me feel so sad, so remote from all of civilization's warmth and company, so spiritually impoverished. It's made of wood and brass and has five electric candles sheathed in dusty (my fault) glass chimneys. It hangs on a horrible chain from a horrible floral . . . oh, I know it has a name. . . . well, the little metal round thing in the ceiling from which lights of this description tend to hang. And so it must go. Before the mortgage is paid, before Smoochie's educational fund is topped up, before Christmas presents are purchased, the chandelier must go.

And so I've spent the last day and a half clicking through online catalogues of Tiffany pendants, neo-Italian light-boxes, Rococo jewel boxes, haughty German Konceptual art, chandeliers made of antlers, of driftwood, of styrofoam cups. Chandeliers with green teardrops, red garlands, fairies, roses, ivy, spikes, real candles, fake candles, no candles. Mother-of-pearl losenges, Swarovski crystals, leather harnesses, aluminum tubing, flourescent tubing, frogs.

What I want: to flick a switch and set off An Event. I want a combination disco ball, diamond necklace, snowball fight, icing sugar marching band that also takes requests for 80s new wave classics.

The woman at The Lighting Centre has clearly never before gotten a request for a chandelier that looks like a snowball fight, or at least that's the impression I got.