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Daily Prompt: In Things We Trust

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 12 asks, “Machines, appliances, and gadgets sometimes feel like they have their own personalities—from quirky cars to dignified food processors. What’s the most ‘human’ machine you own?” (I wrote a piece that touched on this earlier; this question gave me a chance to add some more thoughts to it.)
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In “The Li’l Guys,” I wrote that I believe some of my writing utensils are friends and some can not be trusted:

“I have a superstitious nature, something that I am loathe to admit to. Place two identical pens before me, give me a day or two to use them, and I will declare one a favorite, and the other? I will have held it perhaps once, but I will have felt something about it frustrating or ‘wrong,’ and left it alone. From then on, forever. I buy replacement pens even though I own many pens and have not been without a pen in decades. (The Zebra F-301 or G-301 model, for completeness’ sake. Black ink, 1.0 mm point size.)

“Pencils, too. I am probably the ideal Blackwing 602 customer, but I like money more. A 12-pack of the pencil will set a customer back approximately $20. That is a lot of money for a dozen pencils, eight of which I might very well ignore for forever in my writing tool superstition. So even though I have held a Blackwing 602 only one time so far in my life and I drooled over its swift action on the page, I have not purchased a set and I tell myself that it is because these are knockoffs made by a company that bought the naming rights and not the classic pencils themselves. Those, the original ones, pop up on eBay with an asking starting bid of $100 for two pencils. Yes, unused.”

(This listing is current as of September 12, 2014.)

If you ever hear about me spending more than one hundred dollars cash money on a pair of pencils, a couple dramatic changes must have happened in reality that you will have to bring me up-to-date about when you see me do this. First, wealth must have happened to me. Because if I have spent fifty bucks per writing device, the inner cash register that is always ringing in my head must have been disconnected. I had better be able to sell everything written or doodled or listed on a piece of paper written by my hands with one of those pencils clutched in it. I had better be able to find a cash buyer willing to buy the shavings in the sharpener from those pencils. Nothing can go to waste.

Second, the only way I could purchase those pencils would be if something else was disconnected in my mind: the thought that some pens or pencils work for me and some do not work for me, out of the same pack. The thing I confessed above. It is one thing to spend a few dollars on a bag of pens or a few more on a pair of Zebras, and discover that one pen is instantly my favorite and it gets used for everything while the rest sit unused forever in my desk, but what if I discover that neither of these $50 pencils “works” with me, does not “feel right.” This would be tragic, unbearably sad.

So I ascribe things like motives and intentions and feelings to inanimate objects like pens, pencils, and notebooks. Thus, I usually think of the world of machines as one in which I must fend for myself and keep looking for friends where I can find them. It is one thing to find the right pen, the pen that will be a partner for life while you ignore the rest from the same pack, but it is another to buy the “wrong” computer or big-ticket item. I have purchased the wrong computer and regretted it:

“My writing implement superstition has reared its head in my life with computers, though, sad to say for my wallet. At this point, it would take me longer than you have available for me to recount the number of computers, laptops, and handhelds I have owned. (I loved the Treo 90 and owned a half-dozen over the years, some of which felt right and some of which did not.) Some computers I became attached to like a beloved typewriter, others were only employed to go online and make sure I was still alive when I discovered that typing on them just didn’t ‘feel right.’ Four years ago I purchased a full-sized laptop on which I tried to write a book. Either the keyboard was built too sensitively or I typed on it like an orangutan, but it no longer produces the letter C. (One of the top 13 letters in our alphabet.) When the briefly popular Netbooks came out (the era lasted approximately six months in 2006), I bought an Acer. Upon learning that the full-size machine was resistant to writing, at least any words that needed the letter C, I returned to the Acer and discovered I was making more progress on that book project. It sat, happy to be employed, on top of the full-size laptop.”

One laptop, in a spiteful fit of pique, even started to shed keys on me, to prevent me from writing on it any longer: The backspace key came off. I could not correct anything. Everything I wrote had to be the final draft. It knew I did not like anything that I was writing on it anyway, so it took matters into its own hands. Like many of the pens in my desk that are still full of ink, my many very sharp and long pencils with clean erasers, and the composition books on which I have only written the date, it knew that I was never going to compose the Great American Anything with it. I no longer have that laptop, but I still have its backspace key, somewhere, to remind me to make friends with my tools.

Daily Prompt: Voices in My Head

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“You should be on the radio.”

I have heard this sentence from childhood, when my voice suddenly and without the typical teenager pitch shifts and volume wobbles—the “Peter’s voice is changing, this week on a very special episode of ‘The Brady Bunch'”-type changes—deepened and thickened to a baritone/bass. In the past, I blamed this on doing theater starting in junior high school, as that school did not have a stage at all and my high school theater did not have a sound system, so I learned at a young age how to project my voice and fill a big room without sounding like I am yelling. I now realize that this theory, like many of my theories, makes approximately no sense.

“You should be on the radio.”

A woman behind me on line said it to me a few days ago. She did not even say hello, which is usually how this moment transpires: A stranger hears me speak and tells me that I sound like an announcer. Some ask if they have heard me on the radio. (This is possible, but not likely.) Some suggest I send a recording to a radio station.

It is always a compliment and I appreciate it. There is no “but” to follow that sentence, even though it probably sounded like I was about to turn it into a complaint. Compliments are nothing to complain about. When I was younger, I did not know how to take compliments for things I have no responsibility for, like my voice or my height, any more than I knew how to accept insults for things I have no responsibility for, like my voice or my height.

I recently discovered that there are videos online from 1985 of a high school production that I was in. (The fact that the onstage star is currently the husband of a famous television personality is I think why these particular half-dozen are online, as he is the only person in all six clips.) It is a production of Frank Loesser’s “How to Succeed …,” which is a musical that must be performed by every high school in the United States once each decade for the school to retain accreditation. (It’s the l-a-w!) Because I can not sing, deep voice or not, whenever my school was producing a musical I had to find any available non-singing roles and make them mine. In this clip, I am the offstage voice of the book that young Finch is reading.

I was 16 and already sounded like, well, like someone who should be on the radio or someone who should be announcing subway stops. Or someone whose job is recording outgoing messages for funeral parlors—that young me sounds so serious, and it is not, I promise, not because of anything the “role” required. He was, sadly, indeed that serious. Well, that is how I remember me at 16. I had a lot on my mind.

My voice now sounds a bit more lived-in. Living will do that. I have a little more control over it. But my girlfriend tells me that she knows when something has my “alpha male” riled up: She says I sound like a radio announcer or the voice of a book when I feel like I need to make my point in a debate. (Not with her; she established long ago with me that she sees through a lot of my quirks and will ignore those that are unimportant.)

So now when someone at the grocery store tells me that I ought to be on the radio, I refrain from making wisecracks about how adults, unlike children, should be heard but not seen or twist it into an insult about how I am being told I have a face for radio. It is a gift, period.

We all hear at least three voices in our heads: our speaking voice as we hear it leave our mouths, our speaking voice as others hear it (when we hear a recording of it), and the voice of anything we read or write. The one voice most people claim they hate to hear is the second one, what our voices really sound like when we hear it. This is no longer the case for me.
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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 11 asks, “Your blog is about to be recorded into an audiobook. If you could choose anyone—from your grandma to Samuel L. Jackson—to narrate your posts, who would it be?”

I suppose my answer to this is me.

A Two-Ton Hand-Me-Down

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

We are talking now of events in the fall of 1973, when the blue Buick came into our lives and the OPEC oil crisis started to unfold; the price of a gallon of gas went up by half in just a few months that year, from about 40 cents a gallon to just under 60 cents. Getting a second car was no one’s idea of practical, so I do not think it was in my father’s plans or dreams, either.

A 1955 Roadmaster in 1973 was not yet a collectible classic and it was also too old to be of much use as a second car for a young family with one driver. (Did it even have seatbelts?) Thus a 1955 blue Buick Roadmaster in 1973 sat smack in the middle of useless. Even though the car was 18 years old, it had not been driven much; for some reason I remember hearing the sentence, “It has its original tires.” This was probably not a selling point.

My great-uncle, my grandfather’s older brother, had died. If there is a statute of limitations on offering condolences, this meets the requirements: He was an elderly man, he died over 40 years ago, and I never met him. I have seen precisely one photo of him, and that viewing happened almost 30 years ago, too. In my memory, he is standing in a doorway in the photo and he looked like Myron Cohen. (For anyone who is even one day younger than me and not a fan of old Borscht Belt comics, this reference is perhaps a bit obscure.)

He left his personal sedan to his brother, my grandfather, who did not want the vehicle. To the best of my memory, my great-uncle lived in Manhattan and retrieving it was going to be enough of a chore, I mean, reward enough. My grandfather enlisted my dad, his son-in-law, to pick up the car and they brought it up to upstate New York and our home, where it became our first-ever second car. In the long history of uncomfortable and long car rides, I am given to understand that this may have been a top-ranked long, silent drive. (My father can be talkative only after he warms up to you, and my grandfather was not a communicator, either.)

55-buick-roadmaster

To the best of my recollection and some reasearch, this is the Buick. A 1955 Roadmaster. (http://www.fossilcars.com/blog/classic-buick-fan/2012/10/15/1955-buick-roadmaster-series-70/)

The car sat in our driveway, a one-car-wide driveway, a blue mystery to my five-year-old eyes. Life had presented me with one more strange equation: “Someone that you have never heard of but is somehow related to you dies = new car.” No sadness, new car. Except the car was not new, it was old, even in my limited car knowledge. The backseat was not a seat, it was a bench, the same color as the outside of the car, and it was awkwardly, overly cushioned. Thus it was as welcoming and yet impossible to sit on as any plastic-covered furniture I had encountered in the living rooms of “old people.” I could kick out my legs without touching the back of the front seat, which was also a bench and not two seats. I do not have a photo of the vehicle that I came to loathe, but research and my memory has presented me with this photo of a 1955 Buick Roadmaster, a four-door, which is what I remember, in the car’s exact shade of blue. The exact shade of blue.

My father neither put the car on blocks nor sold it, at least not immediately. To be fair to him, even if he had tried to sell the car in that time period it probably had no takers, given that it was not yet a classic and never was fuel efficient. It was a two-ton tank. Thus, even in the gas rationing era of 1973-’74, we had a second car and it had to be started up and driven every so often. The destination was usually my elementary school two uphill blocks away, a ride that only took the blue Buick 20 minutes to make. These were the longest 20 minutes of my life every morning, especially in winter, because that car did not have a heater, or its heater was what people in 1955 expected, or it did not have a heater. I would walk from the back seat/bench to the front and ask when the heat was going to kick on. My father would reply with chattering teeth and I would walk back. At least the walk kept me warm.

The one thing I clearly remember about that evil car is crying from the cold. There is, as you know, outdoors cold, which can be tolerated because you know that you are outdoors, and indoors cold, which is always colder than anything you can tolerate because you simply expect it to be warmer inside a building or a vehicle. That Buick was always colder than the outdoors. Life had presented me with another new equation: It was a dead car given to us by a dead man who had cursed our family.

It disappeared one day. I think my father sold it or put a brick on its gas pedal and jumped out as it drove into the Hudson River. Its whereabouts today are unknown and perhaps unknowable. But I knew one thing, well, I knew two things about the blue Buick: it was frigid in all seasons and conditions, and if something like the blue Buick is what you get when you inherit something, this car was one more reason I wanted everyone around to me live forever.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 10 asks, “Clothes and toys, recipes and jokes, advice and prejudice: we all have to handle all sorts of hand-me-downs every day. Tell us about some of the meaningful hand-me-downs in your life.”