Magical Binoculars
Published: November 26th, 2008
By: Shelly Reuben

Magical binoculars

The first picture I ever saw of a naked woman wasn’t in National Geographic Magazine; it was on a calendar tacked to the wall of a machine shop I visited with my father when he was having a die cast for his burglar alarm. We went to a wide variety of such shops when I was growing up, because each of my father’s inventions (most of which were both useful and decades ahead of their time) needed prototypes.

But the burglar alarm was the one that he loved the best.

When I was growing up in Glencoe, I discovered a closet at the foot of the basement stairs in the house on Jackson Avenue. I only went into it once. Not because I’d been forbidden to go inside, but because, so obviously, it didn’t belong to that era of Samuel Reuben’s life that was encumbered with five children, unprofitable apartment buildings on Chicago’s South Side, lawns to mow, and bills to pay.

The closet belonged to his youth. Exploring it, I came as close as I ever would to owning a pair of magical binoculars through which I could peer into my father’s past.

My bewitchment started with the mirrors.

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The Evening Sun

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