Dreams of Many Colored Glass - excerpt

This entry is especially for the reader in the television industry who enjoyed last week's description. Thank you, Jan.

For three months I spent most of my time there, sitting on a chair in a corner of the dim gallery, not watching the red hatted women on their luncheon tours, not listening to the people with squinty eyes discuss how much a particular item would bring. It became easy to block most of them out. The people I remember were the ones who came around the stone corridor, stopped, and gasped at their first view of the lamps, glowing with color against the dark walls.
They got their money’s worth. Gold, red, orange, blue, green: all the colors in the world. The poppy lamp could have been garish, with its red and green coloring, but it wasn’t: it was a garden of poppies in the sun. The sugar cube lamp was clear blocks, layer on layer like an Aztec pyramid of clear glass, gold glass, and bronze. If you stared at it straight on, sometimes you didn’t see the sugar cube lumps , you just fell into their quartz spaces, rimmed with a border that looked like someone was braiding lines of gold and bronze. Then you looked at the size of the lamp, and you could see the cubes, marching up the side of the lamp, evenly spaced and descending in size. There were multiple dragonfly lamps, depending on how you liked them colored, but the one I looked at when I felt cold inside was bugs at the bottom of the shade, facing down, wearing red wings with that filigree, long green bodies, and bulging red eyes, like aviators with goggles – and above them the lampshade formed of scales in flame colored orange, set with a border of glass jewels. The 18 light lily lamp looked like an orchestra section turned pearl, but one of my favorites was the pond lily, because I could imagine myself sitting on the side of a pond, waiting for the goldfish to pop the surface. White petals with enough yellow to look like the sun was shining on them, platter leaves in striped green, and the glass between looked like water in sunlight. The base on that one wasn’t bad either: a stalk twisted of old bronze.