gat

An incredible vision, these things, orange metal animals with people in their stomachs, throwing
illuminated reflections in color onto the ceiling of our living room by an optical process I often
thought to have explained to me, but never did. Bright sparks flew from their wheels and fell from
the air around the overhead power lines, burning sharp holes in dark places. From our perch, we
could also see long freight trains roaring along the river, sending an orchestra of clanks and
whistle shrieks into the sky. We could watch great paddle-wheel steamers plying the river in both
directions, filling the air with columns of white steam.
From early till late, Grandmother Mossie sat rocking. She sat at the window facing the river,
quietly observing this mechanical show of riverboat, train, and streetcar—four tiers of movement
if you count the stream of auto traffic, five if you include the pedestrians, our neighbors, flowing
north and south on Main far into the night hours. She seldom ventured to the street from our
apartment after her great disgrace of fifteen years earlier, when lack of money forced her to move
abruptly one day from a large home with marble fireplaces. (She never spoke to my grandfather,
not a word, after that, though they ate two meals a day at the same small table.) The telephone
supplied sufficient new data about neighbors, enough so she could chart the transit of the
civilization she had once known face to face.
Sitting with Moss in the darkness was always magic. Keeping track of the mechanisms out there,
each with its own personality, rolling and gliding this way or that on mysterious errands, watching
grandmother smoke Chesterfield after Chesterfield with which she would write glowing words in
the air for me to read, beginning with my name, "Jackie." Seen that way, words became exciting. I
couldn’t get enough of them. Imagine the two of us sitting there year after year, never holding a
recognizable conversation yet never tiring of each other’s company. Sometimes Moss would ask
me to find numbers in the inspired graphics of an eccentric comic strip, "Toonerville Trolley," so
she could gamble two cents with the barber across the street who ran numbers in the intervals
between clipping his customers’ hair.
Although we really didn’t hold conversation in any customary fashion, Moss would comment out
loud on a wide range of matters, often making allusions beyond my ken. Was she speaking to
herself? I would react or not. Sometimes I asked a question. After a smoke-filled interval, she
might answer. Sometimes she would teach me nonsense riddles like "A titimus, a tatimus, it took
two ‘t’s to tie two ‘t’s to two small trees, How many ‘t’s are in all that?" Or tongue twisters like
"rubber baby buggy bumpers" or "she sells sea shells by the sea shore," which I was supposed to
say ten times in a row as fast as I could.
Sometimes these were verses that would sound ugly to modern ears, as in "God made a nigger,
He made him in the night; God made a nigger but forgot to make him white." Yet I have good
reason to believe Moss never actually met or spoke with a black person in her entire life or
harbored any ill-will toward one. It was just a word game, its only significance word play. Put that
in your pipe and smoke it.
On the subject of race, we all learned to sing about black people, officially, in third grade:
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