Tuesday, 7/27/10 - The Happiness Machine V

"Mother, what is that?"

"Never you mind." The older woman's words are intentionally short. She has conceded enough and has no intention of letting her daughter talk her into leaving this behind. "It's mine and I want to take it."

"I know this is hard for you," she walks over and sits beside her mother, "but the new place is not that big."

"Well, then we will just have to leave something else because I am taking this."

"I'm not saying you can't take it with you."

"Good. Now don't you look at me like that, I'm still your mother and you're not too big for a spanking, young lady."

They both laugh at the line her mother has been using on her since she was ten. She reaches over and picks up the machine that is no larger than a toaster and made of hard white plastic. A couple of dials and a meter are set on the front side below a grill. The other sides are sculpted plastic that seems to serve no purpose other than decoration.

"So, where did you get it?"

The older woman remembers the young man who rang the doorbell and waited patiently for her to make her way from the back of the house to the front door. She remembers opening the door and almost fainting dead away at seeing her husband - five years gone - standing there looking exactly as he did sixty-five years ago.

He was even carrying the same General Electric AM radio - the white one he had given her in celebration of six months of dating.

She stood there staring with her mouth open as the young man started speaking. His words made no sense as her mind tried to understand how her eighty-four year old self could be looking at her twenty-one year old husband. But he wasn't her husband then; he was still only her boyfriend. Her "steady" boyfriend and not yet her fiancee.

Her mouth moved soundlessly. She finally managed to whisper just one word: "Jack?"

The young man on the porch asked if she was alright. The boy's words were not spoken by her late husband, the voice was too high and too jagged to be Jack. Jack's voice was pure honey: smooth and sweet and golden.

He asked again and she realized that he really didn't look at all like Jack. No, Jack was taller and thinner and his hair wasn't so red.

But the radio really was the very same one that Jack had given her. She remembers the many nights spent listening to the music and thinking about Jack and how much she loved him. She loved him so much she wrote his name on the corner of the radio then every night she ran a pin over the name until it was engraved there.

The young man on her porch was telling her about The Happiness Machine and holding out the old General Electric for her to see. He told her how this device created soothing sound waves across a wide spectrum of frequencies and how the volume of these healing sounds could be adjusted to allow her to place the machine in one room and still feel the effects in another.

He's trying to tell me that this old AM radio is a fantastic machine that can make people happy. She listened but laughed inside knowing that he thought she was stupid. She supposed that none of her younger neighbors would know what this boy was holding. With the switch to HD twenty years ago, there were no more AM radio stations.

She surprised him when she asked how much he wanted for his Happiness Machine.

Every night she reaches over on her nightstand and clicks it on. She turns the dial and listens for familiar sounds like the waves rolling onto the beaches of Maui on their honeymoon, or the fizzing of root beer floats on summer evenings at Coney Island, or the early morning sound of Jack's footsteps slowly retreating down the driveway and the quickening sound of them returning in the evening, or his hushed whispers breathily tickling her ear.

Now, her daughter was asking where it came from.

"I've had it for years," replies the mother.

"And what is it?"

"The young man that sold it to me said that it's a Happiness Machine."

"Oh he did, huh? A Happiness Machine?" She turns it over looking at all sides. "Mom, did you see that it has J-A-C-K engraved on the side?"

NOTE: Today's image is not mine, it was taken from the internet and modified for this post.