This little light of mine.

MY little kindergarten girl is growing fearful. She tries to be brave and hide it, but I see the tenor in her wide eyes. I hear the occasional sniffle, and I catch the trembling lower lip.

She is terrified by Assemblyman Lloyd Levine of Van Nuys. He is urging the state Legislature to ban--yes, ban!--the incandescent light bulb from every darkened corner of California.

He claims it's for our own good. He believes we are too stupid to figure out for ourselves that fluorescent bulbs are superior. Fluorescents use less energy and they last much longer than incandescents. So, he's convincing more and more legislators to go along with him to ban the incandescent. He says it'll mean people can save money and utilities can produce less electricity.

It'll also mean an early death to my little girl's Easy-Bake Oven.

Levine, in my little girl's eyes, is like Snidely Whiplash. He may as well come into our house, twirl his moustache and tell her, "No more gooey cakes and flaccid french fries for you !"

Now, maybe I'll come to the conclusion that fluorescent bulbs do last longer and do save electricity.

Maybe I'll come to the conclusion that the new fluorescents turn on faster than they used to and they no longer produce an otherworldly kind of light. Maybe I'll start buying them.

But maybe I won't. Maybe I prefer the look of a nice pear-shaped incandescent in an exposed fixture instead of that ugly, spirally fluorescent thing. Maybe my wife doesn't want to apply her makeup under fluorescent light for fear she'll look like an alien when she steps outside. Maybe my daughter likes the heat from an incandescent so she can bake whatever that awful stuff is that comes out of that plastic oven.

The point is, we should be able to decide those matters for ourselves. So thanks anyway, Mr. Levine. I appreciate that you have superior reasoning and you want to impose it on all of us. You can call me quaint, but I prefer to choose by myself, free of the state's light-bulb bureaucracy.

I try to comfort my little girl. I tell her everything will be all right. But I'm not being totally honest. If Levine convinces enough legislators that he knows best, well, I'll just have to live in the eerie glow of fluorescent illumination. My little girl will have to accept the fact that her carefree, Easy-Bake days will be as dead as a 60-watt bulb after 1,500 hours.

But wait. I don't have to take this. I mean, don't we still have the Statue of Liberty? Doesn't she hold a really big bulb that lights the way to the land of liberty?

If Levine manages to ban incandescents, I'll sneak across the border in the dead of night, find an all night Wal-Mart, surreptitiously buy a familiar four-pack, and hide it in my car. For that matter, I'm sure the black market will rise up to meet the demand. Heck, if they can sneak 200 metric tons of cocaine across the Mexican border every year, surely they can find room for a few bulbs.

Somehow, some way, I will get my hands on the illegal incandescent bulbs, the legislature and their light bulb police be damned. Late at night, when no one's around, I will draw closed the curtains, turn on the incandescent in my little girl's Hasbro toy and let her cook away.

And I will eat the wretched refuse from that teeming oven because, in our house, we yearn to bake free.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [e-mail].