Lamp Post

How odd to come across a lamp post as Lucy makes her way from the wardrobe into deep woods and encounters Mr. Tumnus the Fawn. A snow-covered forest in mid-winter, and there stands a lighted lamp post far out in the middle of nowhere? A street lamp stirs imagination, and a lamp post may even be imagination, itself a fanciful creation -- as the lamp post in Narnia. 

Downtown Panama City my early years, 1930s and 1940s, street lamps lined Harrison Avenue. Turned on at dusk, they made our main street friendlier after dark, though they could cast shadows that were eerie for a small boy. The old street lamps were taken down at some point but replaced in fairly recent years. The new lamps are meant to look old and quaint. The original ones were old and quaint.

We were in Raleigh, North Carolina the first week of May for Lauren’s wedding. The wedding and rehearsal venue was maybe half a mile from the restaurant where they had the rehearsal dinner. Raleigh is a quaint old town, and everyone present for the rehearsal of the garden wedding at the historic old mansion was transported to the rehearsal dinner by rickshaw. Bicycle rickshaws. Later that evening as the dinner was ending, there wasn’t a rickshaw in sight to take people back to their cars. We walked. A pleasant evening, downtown Raleigh, walking under the street lamps. As we drew close to a lamp it suddenly lighted up. As we walked away, it faded out and the next one came on, magic, or perhaps they were alive. Quaint, modern, even “green.”

My favorite book of the Bible is Genesis, and my favorite Harry Potter story is the first one. It has the most magic and the most enchanting magic. The opening scene is very late night on Privet Drive. Professor Dumbledore is waiting. Every street lamp shines brightly. With his put-outer, the professor extinguishes each lamp one at a time, soon darkening the street. A cat leaps forward into Professor McGonagall. The sound of a motorcycle is heard, and the machine roars down from the night sky: Hagrid delivering the infant Harry Potter to his new home with the Dursley family, Aunt Petunia, Uncle Vernon, and cousin Dudley. The magical story begins late at night in an ordinary neighborhood of Little Whinging, with lighted lamp posts.

Back in Narnia, one must read book six of the seven chronicles to discover how the lamp post got there. The Genesis book of Narnia is not The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first one C. S. Lewis wrote, but the sixth chronicle, The Magician’s Nephew. Digory Kirke and his friend Polly Plummer are exploring a world that is being destroyed. As they escape and return home to London via an in-between wood, Jadis the White Witch manages to hold on and go with them. In London she wreaks havoc. The children get her back to the in-between world, but as they leave London she grabs a piece of a London lamp post and takes it with her. Trying to escape the witch, Digory and Polly enter another strange world, but Jadis clings and goes too. The new world is dark, bleak and barren. In the darkness, a Lion is singing, singing a new creation into existence, beginning with light. Jadis throws the piece of lamp post at the Lion, but it does not harm him. As the Lion sings and breathes life, the lamp post takes root and grows, a bit of London in the primeval forest of another world. Narnia lovers had first met the little boy Digory as Professor Kirke forty years later in the first book. A “prequel” of sorts, The Magician’s Nephew shows how evil entered creation in the beginning with Jadis. The Lion is Aslan. A lamp post is lighted in the forest of what becomes Lantern Waste, a remote duchy of Narnia inhabited by fauns and dryads in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

Panama City has many beautiful parks. We are blessed. Three parks are walking distance from my house. Truesdell Park, there before I was a boy, today has a children’s play section where I spent many happy hours with my grandchildren as they were growing up. 

In my first memory, Oakland Terrace Park was a thick forest of low blackjack oaks. After church one Sunday morning during World War II, my parents drove me from St. Andrew’s Episcopal a couple of blocks north to the empty woods where army tanks were having maneuvers. A soldier lifted me up and sat me on a tank. If memory serves, it was General George Patton’s tank corps.

Oaks by the Bay Park in my childhood was a motor court or tourist court. The entrance road was on tenth street. Heading toward the bay, there was a double road with a tile pool in the center, little cabins on each side of the road. Today it’s perhaps our most charming park, peaceful, on the bay, with a boardwalk meandering out over the sand dunes. 

The lamp post down in the woods stands in the Narnian forest where Lucy is about to meet Mr. Tumnus the Fawn on a cold, snowy winter day. They will go to his cave and sit before a warm fire for a lovely tea. Cake, little sandwiches, sardines. Mr. Tumnus will play his flute and the fire will crackle and dance with magical shapes.

Sabbath. Right shoe first.

Tom W+