There are so many trends that come and go. Some times this is good and other times it is not. One item from the 60’s that had disappeared and now is back is the lava lamps. This is one item that could have remained lost as far as I am concerned.

When I was growing up several of my friends had lava lamps. I thought they were the coolest things I had ever seen. My older sister also had lava lamps in her apartment. I asked for one for my birthday and also for Christmas but did not get one. My mom told me that I could not have lava lamps in my room because there was not an extra plug in. She thought they were ugly so I could not have one in a different area of the house either.

I was always a good kid and followed what my parents told me. But there was something about lava lamps that brought out the worst in me. I had to have one. I took money that I had saved from a babysitting job and went shopping with a girlfriend. One store had lava lamps on clearance so I bought it. I brought home my purchase and took it up to my room. I thought it would give off a neat glow from my closet and my mom would not know that I had it.

My mother was right about not having an extra outlet in my room. I took an extension cord from the storage room and ran it behind my dresser into the closet. I set the lamp on top of the box that it came in and turned it on. It was a very ugly color, which is why it was on clearance. I still thought it was great to watch the brownish orange blobs rise and fall. Shortly after I had the lamp set up my mom called me down to dinner. While we were eating we heard a crash upstairs and my cat came running down the steps with her tail all puffed out. She was so scared she managed to wedge herself under the coach. The crash was her knocking over my new lamp.

It took my mom a minute to figure out why there has liquid on the floor, and then she saw the box. Her only words to me were clean it up. This was easier said than done. I still do not know what the liquid is in lava lamps but it is greasy and smells and the blobs are almost impossible to pick up. It took me two hours to clean up the mess. I could not sleep in my bedroom that night because of the odor from the liquid. When I apologized to my mom she told me she was very disappointed in me. This is the only time that she ever said those words to me.

Today when I see the displays of lava lamps I cannot understand why I was so obsessed with having one. When I see lava lamps I can still see the look of disappointment in my mother’s eyes when she told me to clean up the mess.