The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

     Mr. Beaker brought the package from behind his back and put it on the table in front of me. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with cord. Slowly, he began to unwrap it. My mother tied the belt on her robe and came over to watch.     Before Mr. Beaker had folded the paper back enough for my mother and me to see what was inside it, my father peeked around the corner and said, “Oh, it’s you, Dudley, I thought I heard your voice.” He came into the kitchen in his shorts, with shaving cream on his face and a razor in his hand.     “Berrrrt,” said my mother, dragging the name out into a complaint, “you’re not dressed.”     “Oh,” said my father, looking at his shorts. Then he frowned and shrugged and said, “Oh, so what? I’m sure Dudley isn’t shocked by a guy in his shorts. Look at you—you’re not dressed either.”     My mother blushed again and pulled her bathrobe tighter around her. “I’ll go throw something on,” she said. “Don’t open the package without me.”     My father looked at the half-unwrapped package. “What’ve we got here?” he asked. He walked toward the table, raising an eyebrow and pointing at the package with his razor.     “Some—thing—for—me,” I said, in much the way that Mr. Beaker had. I finished with a little flourish of my spoon that sent a piece of limp graham cracker flying over the package onto the table.     “Peter!” said Mr. Beaker and my father precisely in unison. They snapped their heads toward each other, and my father knit his brows. Mr. Beaker cleared his throat and turned away. He got a napkin and wiped up the bit of graham cracker.     “Don’t play with your food,” said my father. Mr. Beaker opened his mouth, and I thought that he might say something. My father must have thought that he was going to say something too, since he turned abruptly toward him, but Mr. Beaker just smiled at my father and said nothing.     “Okay,” called my mother. “Here I come.” She ran into the kitchen, wearing the red robe that my father had given her for Christmas. She had put on bright red lipstick too.     “Go ahead, Peter,” said Mr. Beaker. “You finish opening it.” He tugged at the paper a little to show me what he wanted me to do.     I looked at my bowl and at the package. I looked at my father. Very carefully, I picked up the bowl and held it out to him. He took it. The lather on his face had dried and cracked like peeling paint.     I pulled the wrapping paper off the book and lifted the cover. The book was placed on the table with the binding away from me, so that I opened it as I would have opened a box, lifting the cover up and away as if I were lifting its lid.     When I opened the book, it released into the kitchen a rich, earthy, damp odor that I have ever since associated with reading, an odor that I’ve come to expect to smell when I’m about to begin reading a book, an odor that produces an anticipatory thrill and an appetite for graham crackers and milk. Of course, the odor is missing from new books, which smell only of paper and ink, and even from most used books, those that have been treated with care, but from time to time I find a used book with that evocative odor, and when I come across one of these, I buy it at once, regardless of its subject or author. As a result, I have a number of books—The Piezoelectric Properties of Woodcomes to mind—that I’ve bought for their odor alone.     I looked at the endpapers, where swirls of brown, purple, blue, and gold swam—swam, it occurs to me now, like the colors made by gasoline and oil on the surface of the estuarial stretch of the Bolotomy. The swirling colors and the odor of the book made a heady, intoxicating mix, and for a moment I thought I was going to be sick, but I knew that I was getting a gift, and I knew that I should be grateful for a gift, so I looked up at Mr. Beaker and smiled.     “Here, Peter,” he said. “Open it this way.” He turned the book and flipped the first few pages. The paper was thick and deckle-edged. Mr. Beaker stopped at a place with a color plate. The left-hand page was handsome and intriguing but indecipherable. It had on it only blocks of print, squared off along the sides, indented in paragraphs, with irregular lines of type that looked like rows of dark houses silhouetted against a light sky, and intriguing rivers of white that ran along surprising courses, cutting across the lines at angles and changing direction unexpectedly. The right-hand page had a smoother, whiter piece of paper glued to it, and on this paper was a picture, a color picture of a fox in a rowboat, the first picture I had ever seen of a fox in a rowboat.     My father looked over my shoulder at the book. He rubbed his chin, and flecks of dried soap fluttered onto the picture. I swept them off with my hand. My father walked over to the stove and poured himself a cup of coffee.     Mr. Beaker drew a chair up beside me and sat down. “Now, Peter,” he said. “I’m going to read to you.”     My mother stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders, leaning over me so that she could see the page. My father sat at the far end of the table with his coffee.     “This ought to be as good a place to start as any,” Mr. Beaker said. I looked at the open book, and Mr. Beaker began the story.

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

1

ONE QUIET MORNING, a Saturday, in the spring, when I was three, while Dudley Beaker was sitting on his porch drinking a cup of coffee and reading the morning paper, the thought struck him that it was time I learned to read.     Mr. Beaker was wearing a tan satin robe that my mother had made for him, though she had presented it first to my father, who never wore such things, as a birthday present. After a month or two had passed and my father had not worn the robe, my mother asked why he didn’t wear it on Saturday mornings when he sat in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee and reading the paper. My father told her, sheepishly and gently, that he was really sorry he hadn’t worn it, but that a tan satin robe wasn’t his style, that he didn’t wear that sort of thing. My mother admitted that he was right and said it seemed a terrible shame to have a perfectly good robe go to waste and that it was too bad she couldn’t think of somebody else to give it to. My father struck himself on the head with the heel of his right hand and said that he had a perfect idea. They could give the robe to Dudley Beaker, whose birthday was coming up in just a week or two. At first my mother didn’t seem to think much of this idea. She said that Dudley’s birthday wouldn’t come up for months, but my father consulted the small book in which my mother listed birthdays and anniversaries and showed her that Mr. Beaker’s birthday was, in fact, just around the corner. My mother declared that she must be losing her marbles like poor Mrs. Barber, the widow downtown, and scampered off to rewrap the robe, using the original box, paper, and bow, which she had saved on the topmost shelf of her closet, in the back, behind a hat box. When she gave the robe to Mr. Beaker, he said that it was just his style, just the sort of thing he would enjoy wearing on a spring morning, when he drank his coffee and read the morning paper on his porch.The idea that it was time for me to learn to read struck Mr. Beaker so powerfully that he put the paper aside at once, scrawled a note for Eliza, who was sleeping late, left his coffee, and went off to buy me a book.     There was no bookstore in Babbington at that time, but Lydia Barber, who ran a used furniture store on Main Street, liked to arrange the furniture in her shop as it might be arranged in a house, so she kept a good supply of props to lend verisimilitude to the arrangements, including antimacassars and doilies, knickknacks and books, and these were also for sale. Among the books at Mrs. Barber’s shop was a used, foxed copy of The Little Folks’ Big Book, an anthology of fables, maxims, poems, cautionary tales, and lighthearted stories for children. Mrs. Barber was the widow to whom my mother referred when she said that she must be losing her marbles. Whenever my mother thought of Mrs. Barber, she—like many other young Babbington matrons at that time—took a deep breath and thanked her lucky stars that she was not in Mrs. Barber’s shoes, and she made a mental note to call her on the telephone or drop into the shop for a chat.     Mrs. Barber had one child, a son named Matthew, who was about my age. It was Mrs. Barber’s custom, while she tended the shop, to keep Matthew in the back room, which was full of dusty furniture, antimacassars and doilies, knickknacks and books, or, in good weather, to let him play in the tiny yard behind the shop. When Matthew grew tired and cranky, Mrs. Barber would read to him from one of the books that she had for sale, and this habit gave her a reputation for having lost her marbles, since Matthew, although he could hear her perfectly well from the back room or the yard behind the shop, was invisible to the passersby who glanced through the store window and saw the slight woman reading aloud, apparently to no one.     Among the books that Mrs. Barber read from was The Little Folks’ Big Book. However, Matthew didn’t seem fond of the Big Book. If anything, listening to his mother read from it seemed to make him more tired and cranky. Mrs. Barber was not, therefore, unwilling to sell the book to Mr. Beaker, who decided that it was just the thing for teaching me to read.     Mr. Beaker had Mrs. Barber wrap the book. Then he drove directly to my parents’ house.     When he arrived, my mother was in the kitchen, making breakfast. My father was in the bathroom, shaving. I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of graham crackers and milk. My mother was wearing a terrycloth bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. My father was wearing blue boxer shorts. I was wearing a fresh pair of flannel pajamas with pictures of romping, drooling dogs all over them. Mr. Beaker suddenly appeared at the back door, rapping on the window, smiling.     My mother was quite startled. “Dudley!” she cried, and began patting her hair into place. She opened the door and let him in. “Dudley!” she said again. She blushed and smiled and turned her cheek toward Mr. Beaker for a kiss.     “Good morning, Ella!” said Mr. Beaker, full of hearty good humor. He was holding both his hands behind him and smiling. He leaned forward and kissed my mother and rubbed his cheek against hers.     My mother giggled. “Why, Dudley,” she said, “you look like the cat that swallowed the canary.” She took a step back and studied Mr. Beaker’s smile. “What have you got there, Dudley?” she asked. She stepped toward him again and tried to look behind him. He turned so that she couldn’t see. She turned the other way. “What are you holding behind your back?” she asked. She grabbed his arm and tried to turn him around. He twisted away. Her bathrobe fell open. Mr. Beaker drew a sharp breath. My mother blushed and pulled her robe closed. Mr. Beaker turned toward me.     “I—have—something—for—Peter,” he said, advancing toward me and releasing one word with each step.     “Oh,” said my mother. She let her arms fall to her sides. “Isn’t that nice. Isn’t that nice, Peter?” she said.

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

THE NEXT MORNING, I began writing the story down. I think that I might have been able to complete it very quickly if I hadn’t tried to verify some of the facts. When I did, I found to my surprise that I had made up two essential ingredients.     As part of the story as I told it to Porky White, I had included the version of the fable of the fox and the clam that I remembered from the first real book that I owned, The Little Folks’ Big Book. Before I began writing, I went downstairs to the library to see how accurately I had remembered the fable. When I opened the Big Book I was surprised to find that the fable of the fox and the clam was not in it. I had been certain that I had first encountered it there. I had read and reread the Big Book so often as a child that I could recite most of the stories in it, and the memory of the fable of the fox and the clam returned to me with such clarity and force that I was sure it had been one of the stories I had memorized from the Big Book.     A little shaken, I searched through my class photographs from grade school to find a picture of Matthew Barber, a boy who figured prominently in the story as I had told it to Porky. He was not there.     I was rattled. These discoveries were terribly disturbing, because they demonstrated to me that the memories, fabrications, and unrealized desires from my past were in even more of a muddle than I had thought. If I couldn’t separate them from one another, then I really didn’t know any longer who I was. Fabrications from my Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations were invading the territory that had once been held pretty securely by memories from my life. Dazed and confused, I wandered absently to my workroom and stood at the window, staring.     After weeks of introspection, during which I spent much of each workday standing at the window of my workroom watching the Jolly Tinkers build a foundation for the cottage and move it into place, I came to understand why I had fabricated my memories of Matthew Barber and the fable of the fox and the clam.     So that the reader may be spared the time and effort required to come to a similar understanding, I include here a summary of my conclusions.

TO UNDERSTAND the relationship between experience and imagination, one must be familiar with the paint-by-number canvases that were popular when I was a boy. These were canvases or canvas-textured boards on which were printed, in pale blue, the outlines of portions of a picture, each portion to be filled in with paint of a color indicated by a numeral within the outline. It was often not immediately obvious, from looking at the pale blue outlines alone, what some parts of the picture were supposed to depict, but when all the oddly-shaped pieces had been filled with paint, one could see the whole picture—if the painting had been done with care and the viewer stood a considerable distance from it.     It seems to me that my earliest experience with something creates, in my mind, a sketch like the pale blue sketches on those paint-by-number canvases. This sketch then becomes a framework for all my subsequent experiences with similar things. In most of my later life, I’ve been putting paint into the oddly-shaped segments of a picture that I sketched very early. However, as time has gone on, I’ve run out of space on the canvas of experience, and in order to accommodate new experiences I have had to paint over some of the older ones. You can, no doubt, imagine the results. The outline and the earliest experiences are soon obscured. The picture grows more distorted as time passes, at least in the sense that it departs more and more from the original outline. However, since the earlier experiences have been obscured by the later ones, I am forced to rely on memory and on the assumed congruity of the later and earlier experiences to reconstruct the earlier ones, and that reliance has been the source of several illusions.     Take, for example, my understanding of the Big Book.     From the Big Book, right from the start, I got the idea—or the pale blue outline of an idea—that all the characters in the Big Book lived in the same place, a place that was as comfortable a home for talking squirrels as it was for dashing knights. Over the course of the years, this childish idea has persisted, although as a young man I came to regard it with the patronizing indulgence that so many of us, as soon as we become young men and women, feel for ourselves as children and our childish misconceptions, and I felt embarrassed by the idea, as I did by many other ideas that seemed like unbecoming baggage for a young man, the intellectual equivalents of hand-me-down cardboard suitcases plastered with stickers from one’s parents’ travels. But after I had finished being a youth I rediscovered my affection for the idea and began painting away at it.     I have now a fond affection for the idea that all the characters in books live in the same place, the Big-Book place, and I’ve painted in so much of it over the years that I have a picture of a well-populated town, where, with Albertine on my arm, I sometimes walk along a shady street on a summer morning and pause to watch the talking squirrels gather nuts in Emma Bovary’s front yard while Tom Sawyer paints her fence.     At the same time, I seem to have been expanding and distorting the memory of the Big Book itself to include every story that I’ve ever enjoyed, or every story that has had a strong effect on me. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that in the picture I formed of the Big Book I included the fable of the fox and the clam, although in fact it was never there. Nor is it surprising that in the mental pictures I had of my early grade-school years, I painted in the pale and dour face of Matthew Barber, though I didn’t meet Matthew until I entered high school.

Peter LeroySmall’s IslandJuly 28, 1983

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

THE NEXT DAY, at noon, Porky and I were standing on the front porch of the cottage. We were about in the middle of Bolotomy Bay, pushing into a headwind, a driving rain, and a nasty chop. Al had suggested that Porky join us in the transbay voyage, because she had thought it would cheer him up. The two clamboats on the port side, the Kitten’s Paw and Means to an End, were taking on water, and the engine in the Alice Blue Gownhad quit. The Three Jolly Tinkers were bustling around the platform, checking the lines that held the cottage in place, clucking and looking gravely concerned. I was eating a tuna fish sandwich and worrying about whether we’d make it to the island.     Al opened the door to the porch. It got away from her, but she caught it again and threw herself inside.     “This is rotten weather,” said Porky.     “Yeah, you said it,” I said.     “It’s not the rain and cold I mind so much as the wind,” Al said. “Listen, Raskol says we’ve all got to start bailing or we’re not going to make it to the island.”     We scrambled down to the Kitten’s Paw to start bailing. On the way, Al stopped Porky for a moment and made him take a good look at one of the clamboats nearby, on which Serge de Nimes stood in the rain and wind, clawing at the bay bottom with his tongs. “Now there’s something that should cheer you up, Porky,” she said. “You ought to be glad that you’re not one of those guys, out here all day in all kinds of weather.”     Porky didn’t say anything, but I could see that he was thinking, deciding whether the fact that he wasn’t Serge or any of the other clammies ought to cheer him up. When the three of us were bent over in the Kitten’s Paw, bailing like mad, he spoke. “You know, I’m not so sure that I wouldn’t be happier as a clammy,” he said. “It’s not an easy life, I grant you, but it has more of an aura of romance about it than being a giant in the fast-food industry has, you know what I mean? I mean, sure they’re out here in some rotten weather, but after their day’s work is done they gather in a bar along the docks somewhere and tell stories about their close calls on the unforgiving bay, embellish the tales of the legendary clammies, and that kind of thing. It’s like living in a beer commercial. It seems exciting to me.”     “Well, that’s true,” admitted Al.     Porky went on. “And I guess they all must have the feeling that someday, after they’re gone, other clammies, their sons and the sons of their friends, and their sons’ sons and their friends’ sons’ sons, will tell stories about them, that they won’t be forgotten, that they might become legends themselves, you know?”     He stopped bailing for a minute and rubbed his hands together.     “I can just see my kid telling stories about me when I’m gone,” he said.     A thrill ran through me, the electrifying thrill that comes from recognizing a theme in a setting where one doesn’t expect to find it. “This is like the fox and the clam,” I said.     “Oh, yeah?” said Porky.     “Yeah,” I said. “Keep bailing and I’ll tell you the story.”     I told Porky the story that appears on the following pages. It kept him bailing, and we got the cottage to the island safely. When I had finished the story, Porky smiled and pounded me on the back. “Thanks, Peter,” he said. “I guess I’m just a sucker for a happy ending.”

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

     Porky took a swallow of beer and ate another onion ring before he spoke.     “Well,” he said, “it’s like this.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin and cleared his throat. “I suppose it happens to all of us from time to time: we feel utterly miserable for no clear or sufficient reason, you know what I mean? Even those of us who think of ourselves as essentially happy people find that our essential happiness is, at these times, in danger of drowning, as it were, in a sea of misery.”     Al, Raskol, and I looked at one another. Raskol went up to the bar to get us some drinks.     “Most often,” Porky went on, “the misery—almost despair—is brought on not by a tragedy but by an accumulation of small problems. I think it’s the smallness of these problems that makes them so deadly, because if you think about it you’ll realize that our lives are full of small things that could go wrong, and when one of them does go wrong, we’re suddenly threatened with the collapse of the whole Tinkertoy framework of our lives, you get me? When the freezer broke down in one of my Kap’n Klam Family Restaurants today, it made me think there’s a good chance that the freezers in all the rest of them will break down tomorrow. Happiness is a fragile commodity, kids. You get a little crack in it, and the next thing you know it’s in pieces all over the floor.”     Porky went back to work on the onion rings. Al gave me a worried look. Porky wiped his mouth again and went on.     “At such times as that, when a little crack shows up in my essential happiness,” he said, “I respond very badly. I try to resist the despair, and I try hard. I use all the right arguments with myself, and I actually work at fighting the despair, but little by little my strength slips away. It’s like trying to row a boat across the bay into a fierce headwind—can you get that picture in your mind? I’m in this rowboat, and I’m rowing like blazes, but I’m not getting anywhere. The rain is lashing against my back. The wind is stronger than I am. I’m getting more and more tired. The boat is filling with rainwater. In fact, I think it’s starting to leak. I know what I should do—press on, Porky, press on. But I ask myself—why? Why go to any more trouble? I stop rowing. I sit there, exhausted, miserable, leaving myself at the mercy of the wind and the rain.”     I reached for one of Porky’s onion rings, but Al slapped my hand.     “In a perverse way,” Porky continued, “I enjoy these periods of misery. I think I enjoy them because they give depth and texture to my life, to my character, you know? I wouldn’t want to be happy all the time, to have people pass me off as one of the grasshoppers rather than one of the ants. Periods of brooding, it seems to me, show that I’m serious, that I’m sensitive to the pain of modern life, that I’m not unaware of how fragile the fabric of a happy life is.”     Porky sat in silence for a moment. None of the rest of us could think of anything to say. Finally Porky spoke. “Hey, Shirley!” he called out. “How about another beer and some more onion rings?”

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

Preface

Nothing is miserable except when you think it so, and, vice versa, all luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity. No one is so happy that he would not want to change his lot if he gives in to impatience. Such is the bittersweetness of human happiness. To him that enjoys it, it may seem full of delight, but he cannot prevent it slipping away when it will. It is evident, therefore, how miserable the happiness of human life is.

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, (translated by V. E. Watts)

I FIRST TOLD THE STORY that you’re about to read to Porky White, the fast-food clam-bar mogul, one stormy spring afternoon while we were bailing a leaky clamboat in the middle of Bolotomy Bay, but one could say that the story was conceived in a conversation with Porky the evening before, when Al and Raskol and I dropped in at Corinne’s Fabulous Fruits of the Sea. A couple of months before that evening, Albertine had decided that she could attract more honeymooners, young lovers, and adulterers to our hotel on Small’s Island if she had a cozy cottage or two to offer them, set apart from the hotel itself, where they could feel quite sure that no one would blunder in on their moonlight trysting. Al found an appropriate cottage for sale on the mainland at a good price, and she and Raskolnikov worked out a plan for moving it to the island on a platform constructed atop four clamboats.     In the weeks that followed, Al was extremely busy. She negotiated for and purchased the cottage. She solicited bids on moving it to the island, and she chose an outfit called Three Jolly Tinkers to do the work. Their advertisement in the Babbington Reporter(“We’ll do anything to the best of our ability”) had caught Al’s eye, and their bid was by far the lowest. They were three former schoolteachers who distinguished themselves from other jolly tinkers and most other former schoolteachers by wearing derby hats on the job. Al took to them at once. They moved the cottage to Raskol’s boat yard and constructed the platform.     On the evening when we ran into Porky White at Corinne’s, the three of us were excited, even bubbly. The cottage was sitting on the platform, and the voyage to the island would begin the next morning.     Porky, however, was down in the dumps. He was sitting alone, wearing a long face. He had a platter of onion rings in front of him and a glass of beer in his hand.      “Porky!” cried Al. She threw her arms around his neck and gave him an extravagant kiss. “Why the long puss?” she asked.     Porky didn’t answer. He just frowned and shook his head and stuffed a couple of onion rings into his mouth.     Al sat down beside him and snuggled up to him. She turned his face toward her. “Tell me about it, Porky,” she said.

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

[Coming on Tuesday, September 21: “The Fox and the Clam” begins.]

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” and “The Static of the Spheres,” the first four novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

21

GUPPA DIED when I was twenty-five, of a heart attack. Gumma died when I was twenty-eight, of cancer. I still have the radio. I keep it in the cellar, on an old maple table that was here when Al and I bought Small’s Hotel. Beside the table is a wobbly straightback chair. Sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I go to the cellar and put the earphones on, turn the set on, and sit and listen to the static. I know that, in a sense, the radio doesn’t work, but I know too that in the night, sitting there alone in the cellar, dark except for the glow of the tubes, I can sometimes pick up, through the static, the flutter of Guppa’s note cards, the whisper of Gumma’s slide rule, the crackle of the living room fire, the scree-scree of Guppa’s hacksaw, the Annie-ate-her-radiator-Annie-ate-her-radiator of the toaster, one of those sighs that Guppa let out while he worked on the coils, or the sound of my own footsteps scraping on the wooden stairs, when I came down to the cellar carrying a tray with two glasses of milk and a plate of onion sandwiches.

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

20

“CLOSE YOUR EYES, GUMMA,” I said. “We’re bringing it upstairs.”     I opened the cellar door and peeked around it to make sure that Gumma had her eyes closed. She was holding her apron up over her eyes with both hands. The kitchen was full of the smell of turkey. I held the door open for Guppa, who was holding the radio in front of him in both hands. He set it on the kitchen table and plugged it in.      “Okay,” I said, “you can look now.” My skin was tingling all over with pride in Guppa, and with affection for the radio itself.      Gumma looked at the shining radio with wide eyes, and she began clucking and exclaiming over it. Guppa beamed, and so did I. At last, Guppa said, “What do you say we put it to the test?”     Gumma and I sat down at the table, silent and eager. Guppa switched the radio on. The tubes began to glow with tiny, intricate lines of orange light. Guppa put the earphones on and began twisting the dials. Gumma and I tried to read his expression. His smile slipped away, and he wrinkled his forehead and pursed his lips. He twisted the dials some more, and he tapped at a couple of the tubes. He wiggled the coil in its socket. Then he pulled the coil out and put in another.     “How is it, Guppa?” I asked. He looked at me, but I could tell from his expression that with the earphones on he hadn’t made out what I had said.     “How is it?” I asked again, in a much louder voice. Guppa flashed a smile and nodded. Gumma put her arm across my shoulder. Guppa began twisting the dials and tapping the tubes again, and he began to frown. He pulled the second coil out and put in a third.      “Can I try?” I asked. I had to go to the bathroom, but I didn’t want to leave the scene of all the excitement, so I was squeezing my legs together and bouncing up and down. Guppa didn’t seem to hear me. Gumma tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned toward her with a start.      “What? What’s the matter?” he asked in a loud voice.      “Peter wants to try listening,” said Gumma, speaking with exaggerated precision.      Guppa looked at me, and he seemed terribly tired. My expression was beyond my control. I was smiling so completely that I couldn’t speak when Guppa handed me the earphones. I slipped them on and fussed with them until they felt right or at least didn’t hurt my ears too much. I cupped my hands over them and held them to my ears. The sound seemed to come at once from within me, from the earphones, and from someplace far away.      From a great distance came a sound like wind through willow trees, the rustle of the hanging branches of a weeping willow, the sweep of the branches along the ground. Winding through this was a deep and indecipherable murmur, like the voices of my parents and Gumma and Guppa when I had heard them talking together at night, years before, when I lay in my crib. And rising and falling through it all was a metallic sound, like the operation of a machine, very much like the scraping sound that Gumma’s toaster made.      I looked at Guppa, who was looking at his shoes, and at Gumma, who was looking at me. Her lips were tight, and she was wringing her apron in her hands.      “It’s just right, Guppa!” I said, and of course, with the earphones on and the static hissing in my ears I shouted it so loudly that Guppa looked up with a start and Gumma burst out laughing.      I twiddled the dials, and the rushing hiss faded and the murmur became a howl, the metallic scraping began to echo, and an irregular ticking began somewhere far away.      Gumma said, “Oh, Herb, I’m so proud of you,” and Guppa shrugged and smiled. Gumma got up and poured Guppa a glass of beer and then went back to making dinner, and Guppa went off to the living room. Neither of them asked to try the radio, and I didn’t offer. When my parents arrived, I showed the radio to them but didn’t let them listen to it, and then we ate dinner, and after dinner I insisted on taking it to bed with me.

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.