The Lamplighter’s Route
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My grandmother kept a list. Not of grievances — she wasn’t that kind of woman — but of the streets in our town where the old gas lamps had once stood, before the electric company came through in 1958 and put them all to sleep. She had copied the list from a municipal record she found at the county library, transferring each street name in her deliberate Palmer-method cursive onto a strip of paper she kept folded inside her Bible, between Psalms and Proverbs. Birch Row. Canal Street. The Alley Behind St. Hedwig’s.
When I was seven, she walked me along each one.
I didn’t know then what she was doing. I thought we were simply walking — the way old people liked to walk, slowly, without purpose or destination, pausing to examine cracks in the pavement or the faces of houses. She would stop at each spot where a lamp had stood and say nothing. She would look at the place — a telephone pole now, usually, or just empty air beside a curb — and be quiet for a moment, and then move on.
Once I asked her what she was looking for.
She said: ‘The light that was there.’
I’ve thought about that walk many times since. When I was fifteen I decided it was sentimental, the kind of thing old women did, mourning the obsolete. When I was thirty I decided it was grief — she had lost my grandfather the year before she first took me, and the walk was probably about him. When I was forty I had a different thought, which I couldn’t quite finish.
Now I am fifty-one and my grandmother has been dead for nine years and I walked Canal Street last Tuesday for the first time since I was a child.
* * *
I didn’t plan to. I was cutting through downtown after an appointment, the afternoon half-gone, the light going amber-gray the way it does in November. Canal Street is a short block, working-class, undistinguished — a nail salon, a tax preparation office, a bodega with its awning perpetually half-retracted. I was not walking slowly. I was in my coat with my hands in my pockets and I was thinking about the appointment and what the doctor had said and whether I had remembered to call my daughter back.
Then I stopped.
I couldn’t have told you why. There was no reason to stop where I stopped — just an ordinary stretch of sidewalk, a telephone pole, the bodega’s awning striping the pavement in shadow. But I stopped, and I stood there, and I felt the way you feel in a church when the choir begins and you weren’t expecting it and something in your chest simply opens.
I stood for what was probably forty-five seconds but felt much longer.
Then I walked on.
* * *
That evening I found my grandmother’s Bible in the closet where I’d put it after the funeral. It was heavier than I remembered. I sat at the kitchen table and turned to the place between Psalms and Proverbs, and there was the list, still folded in the same tight quarters it had lived in for perhaps sixty years, the paper soft as cloth.
I unfolded it carefully.
The handwriting was exact and unhurried. Birch Row. Canal Street. The Alley Behind St. Hedwig’s. Six streets in all. She had written the list in pencil and then, on another day, I could tell, had gone over each name in ink — the lines thicker, more deliberate, as if ratifying something.
At the bottom, in ink only, she had written a single sentence I had never noticed as a child:
‘To witness what was given is also a form of thanks.’
* * *
I don’t know what my grandmother believed, exactly. She went to Mass every Sunday and said the rosary on weekdays but she never spoke about God in the way people do when they want you to know they mean it, the way that always sounds like argument. What she did instead was notice things. She noticed which neighbors swept their porches before rain, and which baker got his bread out earliest, and on which corner the purple loosestrife came back every August even though the city kept cutting it down. She noticed, I think, as a form of devotion — the way a person turns toward a window not to see through it but because the light is there.
The lamplighter’s route, she once told me, was the same every night, dusk to dark, lamp to lamp. He didn’t choose it. The route chose him. He walked until the whole town was lit and then he went home.
I asked her once if the lamplighter was afraid of the dark.
She said: ‘Why would he be? He spent his whole life making light.’
* * *
I have not become religious in any clear sense. I still forget to be grateful. I still lose whole days to fear. The doctor’s news last Tuesday was not catastrophic but it was not nothing, and there will be more appointments, more amber-gray afternoons, more days of not knowing how to hold the thing I’ve been handed.
But I have put the list on my refrigerator.
I am going to walk all six streets, one by one. I will stop where she stopped. I will look at the empty place where the light was and I will try to do what she did — which was, I think, simply this: to be present to what is no longer visible but was once, genuinely, there.
I don’t know if that’s prayer. I don’t know if it matters whether I call it prayer.
The lamplighter walked the same route every night and the town lit up and he went home.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe it was always enough.
Leslie Williams is a mindfulness teacher with a decade of experience in corporate and retreat environments and has helped hundreds of people navigate personal changes. She has a master’s degree in contemplative psychology and is trained in advanced spiritual direction.
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