NEW YORK TALK WAS A HECK OF A shock to me. So were mountains. You can read about things all your life and still be completely unprepared for what they actually turn out to be. At any rate, I certainly wasn't prepared for Pennsylvania , all full of mountains like what I saw out of the Pullman window that morning, and I can still hear the Western Union kids that swarmed over the train as we pulled into Manhattan Transfer . "Teleegrams to all pernts," with a metallic zing that sounded like a straight mute in a twodollar trumpet. Sounds stay in your memory longer than anything else, it seems to me. The older I get, the clearer I can hear the sounds that were the dimensions of the world during my first seven or eight years in it back in Mason City. Sounds like Mama scraping the burnt toast downstairs while you're hurrying into your "ironclad" stockings and your "underwaist"—that little harness affair with all 11 /. the buttons on it. And the particular sound of your front door opening in the winter and the screen door slamming in summer, and Papa's derby hitting the newel post in the front hall, almost a dead heat with the six o'clock whistle you could hear all the way from the roundhouse, and "The Toreador Song" on the music box while you had to take your afternoon nap. Sunday naps were different. The street sounds in front would be quieter—more sedate, sort of. A walking horse would pass by and you'd fall asleep, doubling up the tempo in your mind to make it sound like he was galloping. The illusion was perfect, except it took him so long to get up to Brice's corner that you knew he must be walking after all. Sunday sounds always began with Mama playing "Jerusalem the Golden" and "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam," or maybe "The Church in the Wildwood," on the black upright piano in the parlor, while my brother Cedric and I were brushing the snow off "Little Nemo" and "Buster Brown and Tige" and trying to figure out how to keep from going to Sunday school. You could hear Mr. Sale shoveling off his walk next door—a big tinny snow-shovel sound for a drifty, sunny, sparkling snowfall, and a hard scrapy coal-shovel sound for a gloomy hard-packed freeze. There was a difference in the sound of lawn 12 [54.160.243.44] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:19 GMT) mowers too. Ours always sounded different from Mr. Sale's on account of he had a canvas thing on the back to catch the grass and we didn't. The autumn sounded like coal going down the chute through the basement window into the coalbin , and spring sounded like the click of a peewee dropped into your marble box, or one of Papa's carnelians knocking a glassy or a commie across the sidewalk. There was smooth roller-skate sound across the street in front of Glanville's house where it was new cement, and rough roller-skate sound in front of our house where the cement was old and coarse. Summer mornings sounded like beating rugs and washtub handles hitting against the sides of the tub filled with ice and covered with old carpet, which my brother Cedric lugged out to the curb where he had his pop stand. Summer five o'clock always sounded like coleslaw chopping in the wooden bowl for supper, and the big wooden potato masher pounding the beefsteak. Saturdays sounded like the soft-water pump in the cellar—my brother Cedric pumping his hundred strokes, reminding my sinking heart that I had my hundred strokes yet to pump. Happy sounds were Mr. Hermanson's milk wagon, and Mama's "Hoo-hoo" on Thursdays, which meant she was home from the Sorosis Club with a little cup of nuts or candies knotted in her 13 handkerchief for us kids; the scrunch, as you took a juicy bite out of a stalk of fresh pieplant all nice and dirty from rubbing it in a fistful of Grampa's rock salt out of the salt barrel in the barn; the after-school sounds of erasers being banged together and the "squish" of the soundless door to the public library. Gloomy sounds were Papa's shaking down the ashes out of the grate down-cellar, reminding you that come Saturday you...