Thank you thank you thank you
The way Jeff’s father says “thank you thank you thank you.” Very quickly, no pause between the thank yous. And now I have started to say it too, the same way.
Vivian Gornick in Odd Woman in the City talks about helping an old man cross an icy patch of sidewalk. Afterward, the old man says to her plainly, “Thank you.” No supplicating, no “you’re so very, very kind”. She appreciated that, said it was an acknowledgment of the ordinary condition of someone needing help and someone recognizing that need, providing that help.
***
The sound of my mom’s typing. Little metal hammers striking an inked ribbon. One letter per hammer, upper- and lowercase sharing a hammer. Before the hammers were replaced by a single spinning ball containing all the letters.
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The poet Richard Wilbur describes his young daughter’s typing: “From her shut door a commotion of typewriter keys.” With my mother, not a commotion: A staccato blur. A machine gun.
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My mother’s synthetic wig. She thought her hair was too thin. I felt somehow that it was a failing on my part that she wore a wig.
She’d commute into the city by bus. The bus stop had heat lamps, little round overhead heat lamps, and one of them melted the top of her wig. The top became a perfect flat circle.
***
I think about Yvonne and all her hair. All the animals and all their hair. All the energy that goes into growing hair. How when a creature dies, its hair is returned to the earth. All the hair returned to the earth.
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My mother worked for the son of the person she worked for when she was 17. William S. Nolan, a lawyer.
She worked there with her sister Sarah. Sarah a good dancer, but morose, spoke in a weary monotone. Demonstrated rhumba steps in the living room when she visited. Her dancing precise but joyless.
How do you do my partner, how do you do? A song my mother would sing, rarely, accompanied by a glum soft-shoe.
***
Something dark, I was told, about their father. A failed tailor who kept a turtle in his shop. To fail as a tailor, even with a turtle in your shop.
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The idea of “marking” in dance: when a dancer in rehearsal performs the steps in a cursory way to conserve energy. Goes to the place on the stage where a step is to be executed, approximates it, sometimes using the arms to indicate a movement of the legs.
***
What did Nolan make of the two depressed Jewish sisters? Who typed with a kind of libidinal energy. Who typed like some people fuck.
Sarah and Shirley, who’d have low energy skirmishes with each other at work. (A turtle fight?) Who had to type in triplicate, using carbon paper. High stakes. A typo meant using a rubber eraser on three sheets of paper. Before correction ribbon, before Wite-Out.
How did it feel to ride that line? To tear across the page at 160, 170 words per minute, with the threat of wiping out into a typo. Like a YouTube video I saw of a trail biker riding across a rocky ridge barely wider than his tires. The thrill, I imagine, is a kind of sustained hyper-presence. I imagine myself doing that and thinking: you know you’re going to fall so just get it over with.
***
One hammer per letter, lower case and upper case on the same hammer. The shift key temporarily elevated the platform holding all the hammers, the orchestra of hammers. This is how you typed a capital letter. A stately moment, that raising of the platform to type a capital letter. A little like that moment in some Jewish prayers where you make a small bow and then rise onto your toes.
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You rise onto your toes, according to a medieval rabbi, to be like an angel. You rise each of the three times you say the world kadosh…holy…in the prayer “Holy, holy, holy is God, whose glory fills the entirety of the earth.”
Some talmudic scholars say you should rise slightly higher on each successive kadosh, to suggest an ascent toward heaven.
Some say that the first kadosh is the most important, so you should rise highest on that one.
A Jewish podcast discusses what to do if you are unable to perform this action, in an episode entitled, “Praying While in Physical Pain”
The thing is: I never really know when to rise onto my toes or bow. Or when to say brichu, which sort of means amen and is sort of like the carriage return on an old-fashioned typewriter. Marking the end, a transition. Brichu. Amen. Thank you thank you thank you.
