Resonant strongbox enchanting professional#

And in his ribbed, sleeveless T-shirt and baggy trousers, with his ear against the huge illuminated dial of a Motorola radio, days and years roll by, and his hair and mustache turn snowy white. He returns home, grows old, chews Mail Pouch tobacco, spits in a can, and lives in a damp combination basement/garage, drinking Mogen David wine, sleeping in the back seat of a 1939 Plymouth sedan, and, in the evenings, sitting in a lumpy mohair chair the color of an old teddy bear.

Time passes and he joins the army and fights in the Great War overseas. Say he-Mason Linn-this Hungarian man whom everyone calls Doc, this man who may have been your grandfather, never marries. Barnum's circus band and, eventually, with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey.

Resonant strongbox enchanting professional#

Meanwhile, his traveling companion, Imagination, takes up the story about your grandparents and weaves it into something so other, and in the end-according to Imagination -the woman in the beautiful hat dies in the diphtheria epidemic of 1903, single and childless, and the train conductor- who has, of course, fallen in love with her-becomes a professional musician, playing in P.T. And as the story moves forward, Memory relaxes, takes a seat by the window, orders a double Dewar's straight up and stares, mesmerized, at his double-exposure reflection in the passing landscape. Say this time, though, while you're telling this familiar story about your grandparents' courtship, Imagination clears her throat and pipes in with something about a hat, a truly magnificent hat that this young woman who will become your grandmother is wearing on the train to Philadelphia-a big, black, fur-felted hat with velvet trim, a small paper bird, and a pink ostrich plume-a hat far too magnificent for Bess's worsted coat. Say your grandfather, Mason Linn, was a train conductor who played the trombone and dreamed of being in vaudeville, and your grandmother, a young woman who played the violin, a young woman named Bess, with heavy dark hair, rode the train every day from Downingtown to downtown Philadelphia, where she worked as a salesgirl in Ladies' Hats in Wannamaker's department store.

Say you are retelling a story you have told many times before, the story about how your grandparents met in 1902. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.