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

19

BUT I DIDN’T HAVE TO, thanks to Gumma. When I told her what had happened, she got her slide rule and marched downstairs. She had Guppa and Mr. Beaker and me count and recount the number of windings we could see on the outside of the coil. She looked through the instructions and mumbled to herself. She measured the thickness of the windings on the coil and the thickness of the wire itself. Then she went to work with her slide rule. Guppa, Mr. Beaker, and I held our breath. If my heart hadn’t been thumping so loudly, I would have been able to hear the slide whispering through the stock.      Gumma took a deep breath. She smiled and let the breath out.      “It’s exactly right,” she said.      Mr. Beaker looked puzzled. “How many—” he began.      “Exactly right,” Gumma repeated in a soft voice that reverberated through the cellar as if she had shouted.      “Yahoo!” I cheered.      Gumma gave Guppa a big hug, and so did I. Mr. Beaker gave him a pat on the back and said, “Well, you’ll want to celebrate without me, so I’ll head for home.” No one said anything to him, so he left.      Gumma went back upstairs, and Guppa turned toward the workbench, but he was not close enough to it to read the instructions. I walked over to the workbench and closed the magazine.     “I’ll help you straighten up, Guppa,” I said, “and then we can go upstairs and try it out.”      He didn’t say anything. Hesitantly, I looked at him over my shoulder. He stood with his mouth in a rictus.      “I’ll go put the magazine back,” I said. “Why don’t you clean the radio up with a rag so that it’s nice and shiny when we take it upstairs?”      I walked upstairs with the magazine, and at the head of the stairs turned left, toward the back door, instead of right, toward the dining room, where Guppa had built the concealed bookcases that held his back issues of Impractical Craftsman. I went outside, onto the back porch, down the porch steps, and over to the trash cans. I lifted the lid of one and dropped the magazine in. 

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.

18

GUPPA HAD SPENT forty-six weekends in the cellar at work on the radio, discounting the time that he had spent pumping the cellar out and drying its contents. He had put eight hundred twenty-eight hours into the project. I had put in four hundred fourteen hours in the cellar and another seventy-eight making onion sandwiches and pouring coffee. I had made one hundred thirty-eight onion sandwiches, not counting the one that a boy from across No Bridge Road, a boy that I never knew by any other name but Frankie, left half-eaten on his plate when he came over one Saturday at noontime to see if I wanted to climb trees with him.      “There!” said Guppa at last. He turned toward me, raising the finished coil, the final coil, in a shaking hand. He had aged a great deal during the time that he had been at work on the radio. His eyes were red and teary, and the skin below them hung in dark, flaccid folds. His lips trembled and twitched with the effort to form a grandfatherly smile.      “That’s great, Guppa!” I cried, with deep, genuine enthusiasm. The coil-winding was at last complete, the receiver was at last complete, a phase of my life had come to a crisp and clear conclusion. There was no ambiguity, no fuzzy line, no indeterminate point like that between breadness and toastness in Gumma’s toaster, no need for interpolation. This moment marked the end of the work on the radio, and anything to follow, whatever it might be, would be a post-radio-construction event.      “This was the hardest one of all, wasn’t it?” I asked. I knew that it had been; I had been able to see that it had been, even though I avoided watching Guppa too carefully and hoped that he did not know that I knew how many times he had unwound the coil and begun winding it again when he lost count of the windings.      “Well, yes, it was,” he acknowledged.      I could see him gaining in strength now that the winding was done, now that everything was done. He was beginning to allow himself to feel proud.      “A job like this has got to be done just right,” he said, raising the coil a little higher in a steadier hand. “If you’re not ready to do what has to be done the way it should be done, then you’re not ready to do it at all. Now, you take this coil. I could probably have been off by a few turns and it wouldn’t have made all that much difference, except to me. I’d know that it wasn’t right. That’s why I had to stick to it until it was right.”      Now he was glowing. His hand was firm, and he drew in deep breaths of the damp cellar air. He could relax now. He and I would be able to straighten things up on the bench, put the few remaining leftover parts into the electrical gadget jar, go upstairs to the kitchen, smiling so that Gumma would say that we looked like the cat that swallowed the canary, tell her about the progress we had made, then surprise her with the finished radio, listen to a few foreign broadcasts, show the radio to my parents when they arrived, eat dinner, sit in the living room and listen for a while longer, and then go to bed, content.      I heard the door at the top of the stairs open, and I heard rapid, brisk footsteps coming down the stairs. Mr. Beaker popped around the corner.      “What industry!” he cried. “You two haven’t seen the light of day since breakfast, I understand.”      He leaned back in an exaggerated pose and scrutinized us with exaggerated care.      “Hmmmm,” he said. “From the fact that you got up so early, Herb, and from the little grins that you two are wearing, I’d say that you’re getting very close to the end of this project. How’s the work going?”      With pride, I announced to him that Guppa had wound all the coils and we would be listening in on the babble of foreign tongues any minute now.      “Take a look at this,” I said. I picked up the coil that Guppa had finished. “This was the toughest one of all. It has the finest wire and the most windings.”      “That is quite a piece of work,” said Mr. Beaker. He took the coil from me and held it in front of him, raising it to eye level as if it were a jewel. “Quite a piece of work,” he repeated. He looked closely at the coil and said, “Mm-mm-mm.” He compressed his lips and nodded his approval. “How many windings does this have?” he asked Guppa.     Guppa had been smiling, standing with his hands in his pockets and rocking on his heels. Mr. Beaker’s question had a visible effect on him, the same effect as a sudden increase in the mass of the earth would have had. All of Guppa seemed to slump.     “How many windings?” Guppa asked.     “Yes,” said Mr. Beaker. “How many windings?”      My throat became dry, my palms moist. I knew that something was terribly wrong. I didn’t want to look at Guppa, but I couldn’t look away from him. He pulled his hands from his pockets and swept them through his hair, pushing it back from his forehead.      “It’s got about—”      He looked at me. I gave him a jaunty smile that I intended to mean “I have every confidence in you, Guppa. You’re my hero.” He squinted his eyes and peered at me as if he had forgotten who I was.      “I don’t know,” he said. “It was in the hundreds—I know that.” He turned toward the plans, open on his workbench, then turned away quickly, as if looking at the plans would have been cheating. “I’m sure I got it right,” he said. He seemed to be pleading.      “Me too!” I said, with great verve and the conviction that came from a heartfelt desire not to have him wind the coil again.      “I’m sure that a few turns more or less won’t make enough difference for anyone to notice anyway,” said Mr. Beaker. He put the coil down on the bench.      Guppa picked the coil up and peered at it, as if by looking closely enough he would have been able to remember exactly how many turns of that fine varnished wire he had made. He sighed. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” he said. “What do you say we quit for the day and get something to eat?”      “Oh, yeah!” I cried. I dashed toward the stairs and pounded up them. I had to get away from Guppa. There was a lump in my throat, and I could feel the tears forming in my eyes. I felt horribly sorry for Guppa, who so wanted to please and impress me, and I felt sorry for myself, too, for I was now going to have to spend God knows how much longer sitting on the cold metal stool beside Guppa watching him rewind that damned coil.

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* 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.

17

LET ME EXPLAIN these coils that were giving Guppa so much trouble. The reason one radio can pick up signals that another cannot is that each of them is tuned to a different range of radio frequencies. The radio that Guppa was building for me would detect signals in the range of frequencies that are called “shortwave.” Now within that broad range lie narrower “bands.” The receiver would be able to receive signals in many of these bands, depending on which coil was plugged into its circuit. To change from one band to another, all I would have to do was unplug one coil and plug in another. The coils were to be wound on hollow Bakelite forms with pins projecting from their bases that could be inserted into sockets like those into which vacuum tubes were inserted.      When Guppa and I were looking through his back issues of Impractical Craftsman to decide what sort of radio we would build, we had found other, simpler radios, but Guppa had liked the notion of winding these coils by hand, and the thin, shiny wire had appealed to him as soon as he saw it in the electrical gadget store, but what had really persuaded him that this radio was just the one for us to build was the description of the work that appeared in the article: the hours of baffling precision work.

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* 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.

     Most children do not have a good sense of the amount of work required to build a radio from scratch or of the amount of time required to do it or—for that matter—of the passage of time itself. For most of them, time is like a dotted line, with unequal sections of the line itself (events) and unequal interstices (non-events, the periods of waiting for something to happen that make up much of a person’s childhood). I blame this misconception on the type of toaster used in most households: the pop-up toaster. In operating a pop-up toaster, one inserts a batch of bread (usually a slice or two) and lowers it into the toaster. For the child who watches this operation, the lowering of the bread is apparently the last event that occurs for some time, since the string of small events that add up to the toasting of the bread—the real work of toasting the bread—takes place out of the child’s sight. Therefore, the toasting itself becomes one of those interstices between events, a nonevent, a period of waiting that varies, both in real and in apparent length, according to the hunger of the child, the thickness of the bread, and random fluctuations in the voltage of the electrical service to the toaster. When the toast pops up, the child at last witnesses another event, which terminates the period of waiting for something to happen.      What effect, we might ask ourselves, does the pop-up toaster have on the intellectual development of the child who sits beside it, morning after morning, waiting with his plate and peanut butter? Bread goes in as bread and comes out, after an interval, as toast. Put in bread. Wait. Get out toast. Surely, the child who watches this happen over a period of time comes to think of bread as either bread or toast, to think of time as discrete intervals, and to think of being as being in some one form or in some other, with intervals of waiting, intervals between states when, apparently, nothing happens. Such a child would ask his grandfather to build him a radio (that is, lower the bread into the toaster), wait for some interval, and then expect his grandfather to hand him a radio (that is, expect the toast to pop up). When they grow up, these children are immediately attracted to the quantum theory, digital watches, and electronic calculators.     I was not such a child, because Gumma and Guppa did not have a pop-up toaster. Their toaster was a chrome-plated metal box about as long as three slices of bread lined up side by side. At each end of the box was a slot a little higher than the height of a slice of bread and a little wider than the thickness of a slice of bread. Inside the box was a tunnel through which the toast moved from the left end of the toaster to the right. Along the bottom of the tunnel was a set of toothed rails linked by an armature to a motor. The motor made the rails raise the toast, move it a short distance to the right, and set it down again on the stationary base rail. On either side of the tunnel were resistance wires that provided the heat to toast the bread. Little by little, as the bread marched through the toaster, it browned; that is, it became toast.      Now here comes the best part. The manufacturer of this toaster, clearly nobody’s fool, had provided a small circular window in the side, so that one could watch the rhythmic rightward shuffle of the slices of bread and their progress from bread to toast.      From a very early age, I loved watching—and listening to—the operation of this toaster. As the toaster operated, it produced a repetitive sound from somewhere inside the machine, from the scraping of some parts against others, a sound that I interpreted as words, the words Annie ate her radiator, repeated over and over while the bread toasted. I would sit and watch and listen to the toaster and watch the bread through the little window and try to decide where in its passage from left to right it became toast. And from that toaster I learned to think of time as a belt, to think of being as being in transit, and I laid the groundwork for a persistent nostalgic affection for the wave theory of electromagnetic radiation and round-faced watches and slide rules, and I developed a sense of time’s passing.      During the forty-six weekends that I had so far spent with Guppa in the cellar working on the receiving set (not counting the time that we had spent pumping the cellar out and drying its contents after the flood in November), my sense of the passing of time had developed to a point where, although it may not have been as acute as my sense of sight, it was at least as sharp as my sense of smell.      When Guppa and I had begun work on the receiving set, we had, each in his mind’s eye, pictured a similar tableau: grandfather and grandson bent to the work together, youth and age, experience and enthusiasm, harnessed in tandem. We had glowed for a while with the flush of a mutual overconfidence in what an enthusiastic grandson might be able to accomplish, guided by his grandfather’s hand. That glow had faded pretty early in the course of the work, as soon as we had come to see that there was very little that I could do that Guppa would not have to undo or redo later. My helping had degenerated into my keeping out of Guppa’s way and keeping him company, demonstrating by my presence, and by displays of enthusiasm, that I was grateful for the effort that he was making, that I was impressed as could be by his stick-to-itiveness, and that I was still crazy about the idea of having a shortwave receiving set, although in fact I had begun to think, halfway through our third day in the cellar, that I would have been a lot better off if I had asked Guppa to make me something quick and simple, like a scooter, just as I was sometimes struck by the thought, while watching a slice of white bread move through the toaster, that I would rather have had raisin bread. 

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* 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.

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* 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.

15

THEN CAME THE FLOOD. Gumma and Guppa lived near Bolotomy Bay, about half a foot above sea level. Every fall, during the hurricane season, high tides during storms would send a couple of inches of bay water into Gumma and Guppa’s cellar. This year had been without hurricanes during the usual season, but a whopper of a storm struck during the weekend after Thanksgiving. ...

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* 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.

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* 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.

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* 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.

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* 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.