Two Kinds of Keeping

The second autumn has come around to the harbor since you first wrote, and the evenings are shutting in early again. You tell me your house keeps its own lamps when the dark comes on, lit apart from the ones on my row, and a table set on certain evenings that has been kept by your people since before you could stand at it. You ask whether the round I walk has any quarrel with what your house keeps, or whether one of them is asking you, quietly, to let the other go.

Here is what I actually know, and it is less than you might expect from someone this many years at the work. I know how oil sits in a reservoir and how a wick draws it up and how a flame answers a gust before it answers anything else. I do not know what your table is for, because I have never once sat at it, and a lamplighter guessing at another house's evenings is a lamplighter overstepping his own round.

So let me answer your question with a few of my own, since that is the only honest trade I have to offer tonight. Has the round ever once asked the hand carrying it what that hand believes on the way to the lamp? Has a flame you lit ever burned lower, or slower to catch, for having been lit by someone whose house keeps its own lights on other evenings than mine? I have never once caught mine doing that, and I have looked.

Down past the fish steps there is a house that keeps its evenings its own way, older than anyone in it can put a number to, and more than once I have passed a spare wick through that door when theirs ran short and mine did not. I never once asked what the evening was for before I handed it over, and the flame did not ask either. From this end of the harbor, that is all I have to give you.

Whether your table and my round were ever built to sit in one house without one crowding the other is not mine to settle from here, and I would be lying to you if I claimed it was. Light your lamp tonight exactly as always. Keep the table on its next evening exactly as your people have kept it. Then tell me plainly whether your hands, doing both in the same house, found anything in one that pushed against the other, or whether they simply went on being your hands, busy at two kinds of keeping in the same evening. I have my guess. I would rather you found the answer than borrowed mine.

— the Lamplighter

This is a teaching-letter. No one sent it, and it is addressed to whoever opens it.