Not So Idle Hands: The Lamp of Poor Souls
Not So Idle Hands: The Lamp of Poor Souls
Oct 04
Shine, little lamp, nor let thy light grow dim.
Into what vast, dread dreams, what lonely lands,
Into what griefs hath death delivered him,
Far from my hands?
Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall
In English churches before the Protestant Reformation people prayed to the Lamp of Poor Souls in hopes of providing intercession for friends and loved ones who didn’t have the money to buy their way into heaven with prayers and masses held by the church. Pagans had the custom of burying lamps with the dead to offer the dead light in the next world. However, not one source I found in my research for this article provided any sort of benefit to ingesting lamp oil. Although as you will soon find out, it makes a fantastic laxative. If you have darkened the door of this blog before, you may have read a few of the Idle Hands articles about what happens when a husband is left with too much time on his hands. Well this is the tale of what happens when he’s too busy to pay attention. A few weeks ago our little family took a trip up to Mount Laguna about an hour east of San Diego. During the trip we noted that our lamp oil container had sprung a leak and was oiling up some of our camping necessities. The husband decided that we had better change out the container right away and the only thing that we could find readily available was a Gatorade container. Now keep in mind, the lamp oil we were using was “decorative” and had a lovely sunny yellow/orange color like flammable Kool-Aid. Oh yeah! 
So we got all of our goodies home oil free and proceeded to have our regular run of the mill work week. The following Saturday the husband had decided to spruce up the outside of our 1991 StarCraft popup camper and proceeded outside, while I was doing obligatory house work during the commercials of Francis Ford Coppola’s the Godfather. Right after the part where the guy wakes up with the horse head in his bed, my husband rushes in the front door with a quizzical look on his face. Now keep in mind, quizzical is about as close as I have ever seen to panic on this man’s face. He’s the sort of guy that could walk outside to find a nuclear holocaust and immediately determine that we have an unsatisfactory amount of canned goods. The first thing out of his mouth was “I think I may need to go to the hospital”. In the 18 years I have been with my husband, he has never been to the hospital for anything. In fact, he’s barely had a cold in that time frame, preferring to pass germs to me over obtaining any pathogens for himself. He proceeded to explain that he had gotten really thirsty while he was prepping the popup for a makeover and had hastily swooped up the dreaded lamp oil container that he innocently thought was Gatorade. What he received was a nasty gulp of liquid hydrocarbons that thankfully stayed in his wind pipe, instead of taking a wrong turn at Albuquerque in his esophagus. He also told me that he had stuck his finger down his throat to try to get it out to no avail. His career as an aspiring bulemic was short lived at best. I immediately dropped the remote and google poison control. I gotta tell ya, these folks at the poison control hot line are a godsend. Come to find out…. you should never ever try to throw up a hydrocarbon like Kerosene. Kerosene is widely used to power jet-engined aircraft and some rockets but he didn’t really seem to be moving any faster than normal. Fortunately, the substance is much more dangerous in your lungs than it is in your stomach. The nice man on the phone told me that he should be fine as long as he doesn’t throw up and it’s a good sign that he isn’t turning blue because his lungs are filled with liquid. He also stated that it wasn’t recommeded that you place Kerosene in an unmarked container of something digestible. Hmmm… sound advice. The husband is still living but he spent the better part of the evening in the bathroom experiencing what we have tagged the Kerosene colon cleanse. All polutants have left the building and the Kerosene lid has now been taped shut for any unsuspecting fool silly enough to take a shot of the stuff. Perhaps a little prayer to the Lamp of Poor Souls will avoid any future incident.
