Life Sketches

The amazing mind-reading
machine claims a victim

Sometimes my father would sit in his chair, lost in thought, for hours.

I’d often wonder what he was thinking about. Maybe it was about my mother who had a nervous breakdown several years before and was still in the hospital.

He used to take me in his yellow taxi to country auctions, where he’d buy things that we would need on the farm he would buy some day. Even as a kid, I saw the impracticality of some of his acquisitions. He bought a barrel full of canning jars, huge spools of copper lightning-rod cable, a two-man crosscut saw, a pedal organ, dishes, rat traps and more. The only thing he bought that I got some use out of right away was a little oaken box that had a beautiful red velvet-lined interior. It also had a big horseshoe magnet and something that looked like a sawed-off propeller. Two wires with metal, jump rope-sized handles came out of opposite ends of the box. There was a crank in the front that made the gears and the sawed-off propeller turn. The box produced an electrical shock that could knock you to Canarsie.