Knots in My Yo-Yo String Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the coal dust that made a black, choking blizzard. I would crouch down under the washtub, fold my arms about my head, and wait out the bombardment from the enemy battleship and its sixteen-inch guns. Or if I wasn’t pretending that day, I simply ran outside.
    Softer sounds came from the Victrola. The Victrola was an early phonograph, a record player. Ours was portable, like a small boxy suitcase. Whenever I lifted the hinged cover I was treated to a special scent, a sweet dustiness that suggested slumbering songs, music’s bunkhouse. To get the thing to work I had to crank it, like an old Model T Ford. The crank was a stepped metal rod with a black wooden egg-shaped handle. I placed a record on the turntable, then inserted the rod into a hole in the side of the player and cranked away. I flipped a switch, and the record began to spin. Breathlessly I lowered the needle to the smooth black edge of the disc. The needle slipped into the first groove, and “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral”… Bing Crosby was crooning.
    The main sound machine, of course, was the radio. Unlike many people my age, I cannot give a long list of the programs I listened to. What I do recall are three motifs: the Lone Ranger theme song, otherwise knownas the
William Tell
Overture, footsteps walking down hallways, and doors creaking open. Beyond that I simply remember listening. And picturing.
    For radio was a partnership. The radio furnished the sounds, and the listener supplied the pictures. TV and movie screens have shaded us from the evocative power of sound. Our eyes enslave us. “Seeing is believing.” In contrast to TV, which asks us merely to turn it on and become a passive dartboard, radio asked us to meet it halfway, to co-create the moment. The resulting pictures in our heads had a depth of reality possible only when the camera is the person.
    Despite my love of radio, I soon gave in to the lure of television.
    The first TV set in my corner of the West End belonged to the Beswicks up on Kohn Street, a block west of George. Butchie Beswick’s popularity zoomed. Day after day a mob of kids sat on the Beswick living room rug after school, goggle-eyed and gaping like so many guppies at
Willie the Worm
on the ten-inch black and white screen. Mrs. Beswick must have been a saint. Over time the mob diminished, one cross-legged floor-sitter at a time, as new families acquired television sets.
    Our family got one in 1950—a twelve-inch Magnavox—when I was in third grade and home with my kidney illness. Doctor’s orders confined me to my bed, but I made such a fuss that I was finally allowed to be carrieddownstairs and plopped in a chair to watch TV for one hour, not a minute more.
    Television and I grew up together; meanwhile movies seduced me with Technicolor and 3-D and CinemaScope. By the time I got my driver’s license, the only radio in my life was in the family car.
    On July 20, 1969,
Apollo 11
astronauts rode the lunar module
Eagle
to the surface of the moon. Like much of the world, I was in front of a TV set watching fuzzy images of the event:
Eagle
launching from the mother spacecraft,
Eagle
orbiting the moon,
Eagle
coming in lower, lower, skimming lunar hills and craters, seeking a spot to land. I strained my eyes watching, and still I wasn’t seeing, not well enough … 
the pictures in my head.
I rushed outside to my car, I turned on the radio, and that’s where I experienced the landing on the moon. I had rediscovered what I knew back on George Street:
listening
is believing.
    And so is remembering, remembering George Street:
    Cooling myself with a Popsicle stick fan  …  playing chew-the-peg … “smoking” punk  …  digging up the grass between the front-walk bricks (my most hated chore after taking out the garbage) … Mr. Freilich’s long-handled grocery grippers, allowing him to reach to the highest shelf and pull down a box of cereal  …  purple ribbons on a door, meaning someone had died in that