The Egalitarian Nature of the Old Lightbulb

When I was a boy and we were not on the road working, my parents loved to sit out on the veranda of our home in Massachusetts. This porch stretched the entire length of the front of the house and swung around about a third of the stage left side. It was roomy and very inviting with a half-dozen rocking chairs and a two seater swing that took into account the idea that people actually stopped by for a visit. In the summer a large section would be screened off to free us from any care of the mosquito population. People would visit and talk for hours on end killing a summer evening in the glow of the front porch light fixture, listening to the sounds of the night when we weren't listening to ourselves. The park has taken its place for me now; I do not see any evidence that such a scene exists in any of the neighborhoods today. When neighborhood is talked about concerning those days, the front porch was its meeting hall where a lot of the business and pleasure took place. There are all sorts of things one could say about then and now, but that's not the point of this one.

My father had a tendency to segregate the exceptional and the slow (leaving the great unwashed average alone as not being worthy of comment I suspect) by way of reference to a certain characteristic of the light bulb of that time: the unreliability of its brightness. If a fixture had three bulbs, in all likelihood there were three distinct levels of brightness emanating from it, hence the saying, "not the brightest lightbulb on the porch."

The reason for this "unnatural" state of affairs was the fact that any notion of standardization of the manufacture of said lightbulb was simply not to be found. Every damn filament in every lightbulb was unique on to itself. The likelihood of bulbs of roughly equal brightness was maybe the same as for identical twins; not to say it couldn't occur, only that there wasn't much of an expectation of it. This acceptance of variation in lightbulb brightness had social ramifications. When a particular individual left our presence and my father vocalized his often stated judgment that the said individual was not the brightest bulb on the porch, everybody else just nodded in agreement with maybe a knowing snicker or two and continued their conversation without so much as a hiccup. And here is the important point. The next time that said individual visited he was treated equal to any royalty, which is to say like anyone else, who visited, would be allowed his say and share of the tea or lemonade served depending upon the evening temperature.

This egalitarian outcome was not in spite of the non-standardization that permeated our lives, but because of it. That fellah from Lake Wobegone can say that all the kids there are above average and we laugh because as with all good humor there is a tension between our knowing it isn't so and our wish or belief that it is so. There are ramifications for this notion, and it is this: in a world that accepts standardization as a natural occurrence rather than a manufactured one, the guy who is not the brightest lightbulb on the porch is no longer invited to sit down at all.

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