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BUT I DIDN’T HAVE TO, thanks to Gumma. When I told her what had happened, she got her slide rule and marched downstairs. She had Guppa and Mr. Beaker and me count and recount the number of windings we could see on the outside of the coil. She looked through the instructions and mumbled to herself. She measured the thickness of the windings on the coil and the thickness of the wire itself. Then she went to work with her slide rule. Guppa, Mr. Beaker, and I held our breath. If my heart hadn’t been thumping so loudly, I would have been able to hear the slide whispering through the stock.
Gumma took a deep breath. She smiled and let the breath out.
“It’s exactly right,” she said.
Mr. Beaker looked puzzled. “How many—” he began.
“Exactly right,” Gumma repeated in a soft voice that reverberated through the cellar as if she had shouted.
“Yahoo!” I cheered.
Gumma gave Guppa a big hug, and so did I. Mr. Beaker gave him a pat on the back and said, “Well, you’ll want to celebrate without me, so I’ll head for home.” No one said anything to him, so he left.
Gumma went back upstairs, and Guppa turned toward the workbench, but he was not close enough to it to read the instructions. I walked over to the workbench and closed the magazine.
“I’ll help you straighten up, Guppa,” I said, “and then we can go upstairs and try it out.”
He didn’t say anything. Hesitantly, I looked at him over my shoulder. He stood with his mouth in a rictus.
“I’ll go put the magazine back,” I said. “Why don’t you clean the radio up with a rag so that it’s nice and shiny when we take it upstairs?”
I walked upstairs with the magazine, and at the head of the stairs turned left, toward the back door, instead of right, toward the dining room, where Guppa had built the concealed bookcases that held his back issues of Impractical Craftsman. I went outside, onto the back porch, down the porch steps, and over to the trash cans. I lifted the lid of one and dropped the magazine in.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast from the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
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