86: On Christmas Eve, . . .
Little Follies, “The Static of the Spheres,” Chapter 16 begins
16
ON CHRISTMAS EVE, Guppa was bent over his workbench, winding loop after loop of fine varnished wire around a core of purple Bakelite, straining his eyes and his patience. He worked slowly and carefully, and as he worked he counted the windings, muttering the count to himself, repeating and repeating each number so that he wouldn’t lose it in the foggy tedium of the winding. I was doing all that I could to help him: first, I was being very quiet, trying as hard as I could not to create any distraction that would make him lose track of what he was doing, nothing that would make him lose count of the windings on the coil; second, I was trying, by smiling a lot and holding my eyes wide, to show how delighted and amazed I was by the work that he was doing, how impressed I was by his stick-to-itiveness.
It was almost time for dinner. In the morning, right after an early breakfast, much earlier than Guppa was accustomed to on a day that was not a workday, seven hours and twenty-two minutes ago, we had come down to the cellar, and Guppa had begun trying to wind this, the final coil. Guppa had not even taken a break for lunch. I had tiptoed upstairs and made some onion sandwiches for us, on dark bread, bread that I had baked myself, and had brought the sandwiches and two glasses of milk to the cellar, stepping carefully down the stairs so that the scraping of my shoes wouldn’t make Guppa lose count. Guppa’s milk and sandwiches lay untouched on the plate. The bread had curled as it dried.
Guppa’s work on the receiving set since January had, little by little, step by step—some steps forward and some steps backward and some off on dead-end side streets—transformed a couple of bags of electrical gadgets into something that was now very nearly a radio, but that would not cross the threshold to radio-ness until this last difficult coil was complete. Until it was successfully wound, all the effort throughout the year would only be effort expended in an attempt to build a radio; but with the completion of this coil, the effort would become effort expended in the building of a radio. I had stuck with Guppa throughout all the effort, all the time, that he had been at work on this, except for time that I spent upstairs making sandwiches or helping Gumma with other chores, and even that work was indirectly helpful, I like to think. My situation, waiting for Guppa to complete the almost magical transformation of these electrical gadgets, was a lot like that of a child who has put a slice of bread into a toaster and sits, still sleepy-eyed, waiting for the toaster to transform the bread to toast.
[to be continued on Friday, September 10, 2021]
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In Topical Guide 86, Mark Dorset considers Paradoxes; Endless Tasks; and Work and Play from this episode.
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