The book I'm listening to in the car right now is "The Crazyladies of Pearl Street" by Trevanian, is absolutely laden with nostalgic details of life in the 1940's in a poor Irish section of Albany, told from the perspective of a young boy. I'm loving every detail, but often find my mind winging away to my childhood and missing whole sections of the chapter! Yesterday he was talking about department store money exchanges being sent on cables overhead and instantly I was back in Rubenson's in New Holland!
I remember the oiled floor smell and the sharp smell of cut fabrics. We watched in fascination as the clerk flopped side over side the long bolts of "material" as we called it for some odd reason. Then with the fixed yardstick in place she would cut carefully along the prescribed line, folding the cut section carefully for packaging. But then! Unscrewing the metal cage above her head she would tuck the written fabric ticket and Mother's dollars into it, screw it back and pull the magic cord. Zing! We would watch the little cage go flying to a high wooden structure in the center of the store where presumably people sat and did financial things! But all we cared about was waiting for the return zing of the cage, rocking slightly as it hit the docking station! At home, we tried to valiantly recreate some interpolation of the process, but alas gravity has little zing in this case!
Now I ponder that contrivance. Was it because the peon clerks couldn't be trusted to handle the money? Was it to save the cost of many cash registers?
I think it was purely for the entertainment of wide-eyed children from Hinkletown!
No comments:
Post a Comment