Author: helenslaytonhughes

(Oops!  Eighty-SIX! …This past week I’ve been so engrossed in having a wonderful time getting older, I neglected to write my shlog.  But just as I was lamenting this, I came across an old manuscript which I’d written when my eldest children were little kids!  About fifty years ago!  Yay for recycling!

The Hazards of Living with a Player Piano

The resurgent popularity of the player piano in recent years raises the basic question: why?  Why, indeed, should the harried homeowner, besieged by ever-higher school taxes, undertake to purchase an anachronism surpassed in utility and aesthetic unity by the humblest doorknob?

The truth is, people do not buy player pianos, as a result of reasoned planning; they acquire them, as one might acquire a middle-aged, irresistible mutt from the pound.  For player pianos, unlike their simpler counterparts, are not objects to be purchased, but living things looking for a home.  The techniques by which they get themselves acquired are insidious and subtle, and the extent to which they take over their new homes is frightening indeed.

Our own experience may serve as a rough guide to the emotions which prompt the acquisition of a player, as well as to the far-reaching ramifications of such acquisition.

My husband, wearying of constant demands for a piano in the home (“Only a boor would be content to live in a home that has no piano”) set out one pre-Christmas day to locate a worthy, if reconditioned, instrument.  His total experience with instrumental music had involved the usual boyish juxtaposition of waxed paper and comb, yet he felt confident that if he visited a dependable establishment he would know the right piano when he saw it.  He was wrong.  A player piano saw him, and having seen him, conquered.

It was about fifty years of age, but it had had itself burnished to a soft sheen, in which my husband could see his face.  It was an enormous piano.  There was something exciting, he says, about the way it towered over all the other pianos in the store.  A salesman, perhaps under contract to the pneumatic wonder, lured him to its bench and opened its secret doors to reveal the mysteries within: above, a punched-paper roll of “Barney Google with the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes”; below, the massive foot-pedals, with their “U-drive-it” appeal.  From the moment he began to pump the pedals, and the bellows responded with the breath of musical life, and he watched the whole span of keys jump up and down in four-four time, he was lost; a victim of the power drive and a prisoner of nostalgia. Yet he was now a free man, too; free forever from the marital stigma of a non-musical childhood.  “I, too, can make music,” he marveled, and bought the piano forthwith.

Three years have now passed, and it is only recently that we have come to realize how much the player piano which dominates our front hall also dominates us.  First, it has determined the décor of the home.  A modern lamp strikes a mysterious jarring note; only when we have suitably adorned it with ball-fringe, and a bit of dust has settled on its shade, does it seem to belong in company with our aged rinky-tink giant.  Danish modern will not do, nor will colonial, nor French provincial.  The only furnishings which now seem just right are the hopefully patched and varnished items one finds at the Salvation Army store, the multi-colored, globular lamps from the city mission, and the threadbare and overstuffed chairs brought down from elderly relatives’ attics.

Even housekeeping methods have undergone a subtle change; where a vacuum cleaner and a spray can of Windex used to make brief work of it, the vacuum now seems more often to be relegated to the closet, while reliance is placed on the dust mop and the oiled rag.  We long ago used up the Windex, and have come to enjoy the smell of good, pungent ammonia-water in a pail.  The piano itself does not seem willing to produce its best tone if its top surface is bare; its vibratory systems appear complete only if the top is completely covered with a comfortable crocheted shawl, topped by dozens of disreputable boxes of second-hand piano rolls and a large gallery of ancestral photographs.

And as to the family schedule!  It does not matter whether the evening program calls for meetings of the Pack 94 Awards Committee, or attendance at the PTA, or simply a leisurely evening of reading.  Sixty minutes of our attention is required by our piano in order to keep it happy.  It knows its function; it wants to perform it.  It is there to enable the father of the family, weary from the day’s business exertions, to unwind by pumping out “There Ain’t No Maybe in My Baby’s Eyes”, and to gain a feeling of formidable authority by performing a four-handed arrangement of the entire William Tell Overture without lifting a finger.  It is there to inspire the mother to hum along as she carelessly flings the supper dishes through the suds, all sense of drudgery dispelled.  It inspires toddlers to remove all their clothes and perform a joyful ritual dance.  The ensuing bedlam can, in summer, convince the people next door that the neighborhood is really running down.

But if the presence of a player piano in the home makes both dignity and interior décor lose their urgency, it creates new urgencies of its own: the hunt to find a really old copy of “Boy Scouts on Parade” (the shiny new rolls, though being manufactured in great numbers, just don’t feel the same), and the search for a really competent player-piano technician.  It is not that the player piano ever breaks down, but that an enthusiastic small child may remove a crucial wire, or, playing doctor, poke a hole in the bellows.  Upstate New York has a wizard named Bee Burger, who must, like an old country physician, travel for weary miles through snow and sleet to care for his far-flung clients.  New Jersey has its John Duffy, I hear, but I would be dubious about daring a move to New Mexico or Utah.

Two piano-roll companies are again producing rolls by the hundreds, the newest of which is a play-along roll that enables the non-musician to add to the fun with one finger.  Half a dozen piano companies, inspired by spiraling sales, are turning out neat sleek-lined modern players for the affluent and lazy.  These new players, lacking some of the hypnotic characteristics of the 1912 vintage, may perhaps be purchased with some impunity.  But let no one purchase a real player-piano unless he is prepared to find himself more of a fool than he thought.

***

NOW THAT I AM 85: My Little Husband is the Monster-Watcher

Harry slams down the cards on our bridge table.

He shouts at my little husband.  “You are a crazy man!  A dummy!   Rose, get your coat.”

My little husband leans down and snarls in Harry’s ear.  “You can account, maybe, for the Metropolitan Opera House?  The White Tower with the good hamburgers?”

Harry snorts.  “It is a known fact, buildings disappear from natural causes! There is NO MONSTER!”

“If this is what you think,” my little husband says, “then the Mayor has succeeded in his cover-up!”

I ask “What cover-up?”   For this is something we had not previously discussed.

“The greatest cover-up in governmental history, that is all!  The mayor knows he has got a lot of excitable types in New York City, and so that the people will not panic, he tries to pretend there is no monster! “

Now my little husband whispers to me, as if he does not want the Mayor to hear.

“He has got people on the city payroll whose only job is to go about before dawn and see if there is a fresh hole in the ground!  And if there is, out come the walkie-talkies.

“QUICK!  ANOTHER CONDOMINIUM!”

“And they rush one over from a secret storage place they got in New Jersey, and they pop it in the hole!   And the people going to work in the morning, most of them, you think they even notice?   But the few!  They say:  “Another condominium!  Where will it all end?

“It’ll never end, until somebody does something about it!  And that someone is me!  I am willing to risk my life to get a picture of this monster for the people to see.   And you got the nerve to tell me there is no monster!”

Harry and Rose give each other a look, and without another word, they leave.

My little husband pulls on his overshoes.  He hands me mine.  It is snowing a little bit, outside.

“We got a chain?” he asks.  “Also a padlock?”

“Sit down,” I say.  Sometimes I got to be very firm with him.  “Now tell me first, before I should go with you, why are you so sure about this monster?”

H e sits down, his folded hands on his knees.  He looks at the knees.  After a while he says, in a low voice, “Because I saw him.”

“You saw a monster?  You never told me this!”

He stares at me.  “I didn’t want to make you afraid.  This monster – this monster is practically one mile tall.  And, he has great, gnashing horrible teeth.  You can see them when he smiles.”

I shiver, imagining such a thing.

“But his voice!” he marvels.  “It is a soft little voice, a little squeaky voice!   I was on the way home from temple in the night, and all of a sudden I saw his great shadow falling over Sixth Avenue, and I heard him squeak:  ‘Oooooh, Art Deco!  My favorite! ‘   I was so scared, I closed my eyes tight.   I heard a terrible munching sound.   And when I dared to open up my eyes, the whole entire building was gone.”

“What building?” I ask.

“You remember the place you liked to go buy the underwear?”

I am furious.  “That was HIM?”

“Him.”

I no longer make an argument.   Together, in the dark night, we go to the American Piano Company on 57th Street, where there is also the Rizzoli Bookstore.

My little husband chains himself to the door.  He stands erect and brave, gazing up at the sky with great determination.  He holds his camera ready to take the picture which will prove him right.

Although I believe he is morally correct to do this, and although also I am mad at the monster on account of the underwear store, the possible martyrdom of my little husband breaks my heart.  Where will I ever again find such a husband and friend?

Suddenly, his eyes grow wide.

We hear a terrible stomping of enormous feet.  57th Street shakes.

I can hardly breathe.  The monster appears, and opens its horrible mouth, and with sickening sounds it gobbles down the American Piano Company, and the Rizzoli bookstore also.  Then the monster is gone.

But to my amazement, my husband has been spared!  He explains it this way:  “I had to unchain myself, to take the picture.  I did not remember this, from before.”

“At least you got it,” I say.

“Yes.”   The camera reviews the picture.  It is just a blur of nothing.  Like smoke.

He protests:   “But I pushed the button!”

“Were you at the time looking through the view-finder?”

“Well….” he says.

“Your eyes were open?”

“Well….”

“Next time,” I say.

We walk gingerly around the perimeter of the great yawning hole in the ground.  (I like this word “gingerly” because it does not relate to “gingerbread”, as I had thought, but originally referred to “dainty dancing.”  This makes a nice picture in the mind.)

We walk familiar blocks.

The dawn is coming up.  The sun peeks over the end of 57th Street.

When we are almost to our address, we turn around to look.  We can just see the top of the brand-new condominium, about fifty stories high, maybe.

I say, “Wouldn’t it be nice to live there?”

He says “We couldn’t afford it.”

Just a few more steps, and we are home.

(My next shlog is entitled:  NOW THAT I AM 85, I am Leaving My Little Husband)

From the dining car window, we watch the snow falling outside. We celebrate every lurch as the train speeds along. We order the Thai-style sea bass and a nice Merlot.

In the past, every New Year’s Eve my little husband has looked around at whatever party we have been invited to, and he has whispered to me: “New Year’s Eve, a person should not sit in one place, waiting for a new year to happen.   A person should be always in motion, helping along the year to finish up, helping it to jump ahead to the next one.” Always, on New Year’s Eve, he is dissatisfied and a little bit cranky. Even the fireworks do not comfort him.

Finally, this year, we are on a moving train, moving forward. He insists we must both sit on the same side of the table, so we would both be going in the right direction.

The waiter brings the wine. “I will make a toast!” my little husband says, raising his glass.

I raise my glass also.

Now he stands up. “When we buy us a ticket to go on the Amtrak, with money we earned by the sweat of our pants, then the New Year is not just something that is happening to us! We are happening to it!”

We drink. Some passengers at nearby tables have heard him. They smile and also drink, whatever they have handy.

“I couldn’t have said it better,” I tell him.

“And when that clock strikes midnight, and we are hurtling along, is there ever going to be some kiss!”

He can still make me blush. I even wish a little that midnight would come faster.

The train stops.

The loudspeaker: “Your attention, please. Due to a problem with a motor, we will be making an unscheduled stop at this station for…approximately two hours. Until approximately one a.m. Passengers may wish to visit the station in the meantime, where souvenirs are for sale. Your Amtrak staff apologizes for the inconvenience.”

Rarely have I seen my little husband so silent.

As if he has died.

After a very long time, he says: “The movie we saw, the George Clooney one, about Brother Where Are You? What was the thing that blind man rode on? Where you push up and down?”

“You mean the handcar?”

“I would like to locate a handcar. Which I remember now is also called a Kalamazoo.

It is also for going down into the mines. But we would just want to go along the track.”

He hurries to the other end of the car and accosts the waiter.

The waiter looks very surprised and shakes his head. My little husband appears to argue. The waiter looks more and more upset, and shakes his head more. He is, I believe, trying to control himself.

When my little husband comes back, he says “Let’s go on the platform.”

We get my coat and his jacket and we stand outside.   It is snowing harder.

“Maybe snowshoes,” he says.

“I don’t know how to do that,” I say.

“Skis? I know you went on that rope tow with me. Always you hung on good.”

“That was maybe sixty years ago,” I say. “More. I must tell you I could not ski any more, even if we had the skis.”

He sees two boys, maybe teenage, who are playing with their skateboards under the canopy, where the snow has been shoveled away.

“Boys!” he says. “Would you be interested in lending your skateboards?”

They give him blank looks. “All right then,” he says. “Would you be interested in selling them at a reasonable price?”

They turn away and go into the station.

My little husband picks up some snow. He pats and pats it until it is a good snowball. Then with an outraged cry, he hurls it at the train, where it smacks against a window and falls back down, breaking into a million snow-pieces on the platform.

I am only joking when I say “I guess all that is left is: we could hitch a ride.”

But he becomes more furious.

“Hitch a ride?” he fumes. “Hitch a ride? A person who does such a thing is a beggar! A supplicant! Never will we be beggars!”

“But sometimes, you pray. Like, ‘Baruch atah adonai, etcetera.’ And sometimes in the etcetera are you not a supplicant?”

“Well, maybe a little,” he admits. “But mostly I am a person that is making praise.”

“So – let’s be both,” I say.

We stand by the road.

We point our respective thumbs in the direction we and the train were going.

My little husband waves his thumb back and forth, at first a little bit reluctantly, then with increasing vigor and increasing enthusiasm.

Pretty soon he starts to smile, and the smile gets bigger and bigger as the snowflakes settle on his nose, on his curly hair, on the shoulders of his old leather jacket.

He is his joyful self again, waving, waving, and I start to think that maybe he feels he is personally, with his very own thumb, bringing in the New Year.

***

NOW THAT I AM 85: Drawing On The Right Side of The Brain On The Bus

This is a true story.  My “little husband” stories are not true.  They are made up.

If you do not like true stories, do not read any further.

A few years ago was the first time I read the book DRAWING ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN, by Betty Edwards.

I hope that if you have not read it, you will, because it helps everyone to draw things if they want to.

For instance, if you take a photo of a person’s face, and turn it upside down and then  commence to draw that face, you will see its features so much more clearly than if the photo were right-side up.

Why is this?  Apparently it is because when we see the face right-side up, we tend to draw it according to our preconceived ideas of what a face ought to look like.  After all, we have seen a thousand faces, and we should know!

But when we turn the picture upside down, we can see that the face, its contours, its lines and bulbations were previously unknown to us.  (“Bulbations” is a neologism I just made, but probably its meaning is obvious to you.)

Now we see that this person’s eyebrows are close together in the middle of the face.  Moving outward from there, they lift slightly about half an inch from their outer edges, and then hurtle back down.  The left concurrence of the lips curls upward, while the right is an abrupt straight line.  The nostrils are not as interestingly modeled as we had thought.  The upside-down trick yields many surprises!

Also, if you concentrate hard on the “negative space” around, say, a spoon or a seated squirrel, suddenly you will be able to really, really see the spoon or the squirrel!

What does Ms. Edwards mean by “negative space”?  Well, just put the silver spoon down on a dark surface, and focus intently on everything around the spoon that is NOT the spoon.  See the lines and curves that separate the spoon from the not-spoon.  It takes a while, but it can be done.  (If I have failed to make myself clear, read the book; it is in practically every library in the whole world because it is so popular.   Also, it has a lot of pictures.)

But here is the serious part, and a warning.  She says that when you see someone’s face – not quickly passing on the street, but on the bus or train where you can look for a while – if you concentrate hard on the “negative space” around that face, at some point the face will become beautiful.  Every single one, she says, will appear that way to you, no matter how ordinary or even ugly it may have seemed at first.

So I tried concentrating hard and often, and it was true!

Every single face.

But the warning is this:

(“This is too wonderful for me…”)

On one bus, one day, I was focusing on one randomly-chosen face.  The person may have been middle-aged, old, young, clean, dirty – I don’t remember.

All I know is that at some point that face began to radiate, in an incomprehensible, unearthly brightness, a beauty that was, quite truly, unbearable.

Unbearable.

I have never ever dared to do this practice again.

I still ride the bus every day, though, and look, idly, at the faces.
(My next shlog is entitled: My Little Husband and the New Year’s Eve Happening)

Now I hear him at the front door, scraping his boots on the boot-scraper.

“So how did it go?” I ask.

“Fantastic!” He hauls off his boots, pulls off his backpack, plunks himself down on the recliner, and up go his feet. “Look what I have received!”

From his backpack he pulls out magic markers of assorted bright hues. He holds them up, a cheerful rainbow of colors. “These are the twelve tools of recovery!”

“They are very nice. Will you go back now once a week, twice a week, what?”

“I don’t have to go back at all!” he says proudly. “I have only to use the twelve tools with perfect faithfulness, and I am victorious!”

“My goodness!” I marvel.

“And it is a good thing, because she costs five hundred dollars a session.”

“You found a lady analyst?” I ask. (I have sometimes harbored ambitions toward that profession myself, because I have noticed that ladies are good at these things.)

“Not just a lady!” he marvels. “She went even to Barnard! Now should we make our supper?”

I have a surprise for him. “Tonight I cooked the whole thing myself, in case you would be tired from being analyzed. It is a roasted chicken.”

“You got also some livers?”

“Of course.”

I remember the night it was decided he should see an analyst.

Harold and Rose were here for our weekly bridge. My little husband and Harold had one of their altercations.   Usually these end without violence, but this time my little husband overstepped the bounds and threw some strawberry meringue right in Harold’s face. He even refused to apologize.

“You need to see somebody,” Harold says.   He wipes the pink fluff off his chin and licks it off his fingers.   “You are a sick man, and a crazy one.”

Rose says: “An analyst. That is what he needs. The kind with a lot of degrees.”

They leave in a huff. We don’t even finish the bridge game.

My little husband and I sit quietly for a while.

He says softly, “Do you think they’re right? Am I a crazy person?”

“Well,” I say. “Maybe a little bit. But there is many kinds and also degrees of crazy, and I read a book that said….”

He interrupts. “Yes or no.”

“Well, since you put it that way…….”

Anyway, it is nice to have him home now, eating the roasted chicken and the livers.

I say “After the meal, shall we play some Parcheesi?”

“I gotta go out and do the twelve tools,” he says.

“All at once?”

“Why wait? First I got to write my name,” he says.

I give him a piece of paper, but he shakes his head. “On the tablecloth,” he says.

He writes only his first name, in green.   “I will use each time only my first name. Because, when it gets to the truck part, you have to consider the police.”

He inspects the name he has written on the tablecloth. “You see how small I wrote it? The analyst, she pointed this out to me. It looks all squooshy-up together. Like it couldn’t breathe good. “

“I think I remember that is the way you have always written it.”

“That is the whole point!” he fumes. “Never altering! Never growing to be something new and wonderful! Staying all tight and squooshed all these years!   And yet– I believe her statement:   ‘Change is hard, but a man can change.’”

“What next?” I ask.

“Step One: I have just done it!   Step Two is: I go outside and I write my name on a window in the back of the house. Then a window in front. I try to make the name a little bigger; more open. I cross the “T” with a kind of devil-may-care. Make the loop of the “G” more round. And how I write it, I become it!”

“Next,” he says, “I write my name on the neighbor’s window.   Our car.   Their car. Bigger every time!   More devilish the T!   More loose the loops!”

His gestures get bigger. His voice gets louder. He gets more and more excited.

“And finally I’m walking down the street, and I see a truck! A big, clean truck! And I write my name on the side of it! My big, big name!”

I see that he is already victorious. “And I am become a big, big person! So big he can always be nice!   I am going now.”

“I will go with you,” I volunteer. “Then if the police come, I can tell them there is something wrong with your brain and you have seen an analyst.”

“Come on, then!” he cries joyfully.

It is a wonderful evening of name-writing, and at the end of it, on a beautiful dark street with such lovely majestic trees, we find a truck, and he writes his name on the side of it, with the bright red marker. He writes his name in great big letters, each one a foot high.

A police car comes around the corner.

It has lights and loud sirens.

We run.

(My next shlog is entitled: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain on the Bus)