Dial Down

Brief thoughts on found objects, Vol. 10: The dining-room dimmer.

Go ahead — touch that dial. Photo ©2025, Ted Anthony.

I HOLD IN MY HAND an item of questionable significance, even for this space. It’s the dimmer dial from the dining room in my childhood home — and, not incidentally, current home — that was just removed this week by a friendly and efficient electrician rushing to get multiple jobs done in time for the holidays.

What’s written on the dial is worn down, although it does say something about wattage. I believe it also says “INCANDESCENT ONLY.”

The logo in the middle looks like “TI.” Texas Instruments? I can’t say for sure, and my searches yield little. But what I’m holding, while destined for the garbage pail (although perhaps not at my hands) is one of those things that lived, until Monday, suspended in what we might call deep time.

It has been the dimmer switch in our dining room since I was a little kid (note: late 1960s) and before, right back to when my parents built the house in 1965.

So many people’s hands touched this dial: my mother, my father, likely my grandmother, my sisters and other people turned this on and off, over and over, wearing its edges smooth. The British renters when we moved to Singapore for a year spun it for a while, as did the German tenants when we lived in China for a year.

The dial sat there, silent and plastic and insensate, as elaborate holiday meals and my mother’s unparalleled, wafer-thin oatmeal Christmas cookies were served in the dining room across her lifetime, as bustle and cooking and conversation unfolded in the kitchen just feet away. The dial watched as each of my parents had their final family meal in that room with two of their grandsons in the 2010s, then faded and eventually died.

Now, I am mostly happy to say, I am the proud owner of a brand-new dimmer that plays nice with the dining-room light and turns it up to full capacity so people can actually sit in that room without it seeming like a tenement building circa 1906. The new dimmer, though, is now just a tiny switch on the side — a microlever, I suppose you could call it. There is no more rotund, easy-to-grab disk like the one I’m holding while I ponder its disposition. Perhaps humanity’s fine motor skills have developed even further since the 1960s.

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My parents in front of their — and eventually my — house, c. 1967.

I OFTEN WONDER why I make such a big deal out things like a small item of plastic that was belched forth by some distant factory during Lyndon Johnson’s administration.

I think it goes back to that notion I mentioned of deep time: the fact that these things can exist among us, moving through the world at a different pace than we do as they witness conversations private and public, celebrations, arguments — entire lifetimes, even.

And then, one day, they are just gone. Does anything actually depart with these tiny fragments of daily life when they outlive their usefulness?

I have asked myself many times if it’s possible that physical objects have souls, if they are somehow imbued with echoes of the things they saw. As I hold this dimmer in my hand, this insignificant household item somehow contains — at least in my own brain — a tiny, fragmentary sliver of the essence of the house where it sat for so long.

I propose that might be a bit of a metaphor for human time overall. We move through the world and then we are gone. And eventually, for most of us, nobody notices that we were ever there in the first place. A dim prospect to me, if you’ll pardon the somber pun.

In this case, though, I have a nice twist to consider before I walk away from these ruminative thoughts. I do find it interesting that the replacement switch, freshly installed, helps the light in the room burn noticeably brighter.

Maybe there’s something in that to figure out as well.