We’ve got Venetian blinds on most of the windows in our house. Depending on a given window’s age, you open and close its blinds using either a traditional drawstring-and-pulley arrangement, or one of those long rods (the preferred term, apparently, is wands) which hang down the (usually) left side. Twist the wand in one direction, the blinds open; in the other direction, they close.
I have noticed that The Missus and I have different preferences, conscious or otherwise, about closed blinds — preferences in the way they slant: down into the house, or down to the outside. Actually, my preferences differ from room to room, even window to window. The Missus, for her part, seems to always choose the “slanting down and in” option. If you survey the house’s windows by walking from room to room, you’ll see some closed blinds tilting up, and some tilting down. This means that in order to open them, the direction in which to twist the wand depends on who closed them. (You are following this, right?)
I’d noticed that preference a long time ago. As it happens, I’ve got conscious reasons for my preference — can’t speak for The Missus — but the preference isn’t a strong one. (Mostly, I don’t know if my reasons actually make sense or are just the product of an easily distracted imagination.)
Until the last week or so, though, I’d never wondered about the wands. But there I was in front of a window, my left hand on the wand, and I was turning it to open (or close) the blinds, and I suddenly, well, noticed I was doing it. And I said to myself: Huh. How’d I know to do that?
I’d never wondered about The Opening (or Closing) Twist: how do we know which way to turn the wand? Is this a special form of whatzit, muscle memory? (I don’t think so, because there’s a little cognitive switch which has to flip before the muscles take over.) It’s gotta be a learned behavior — can’t imagine our ancestors ever needing the particular skill, right? — and the consequences of getting it wrong aren’t great in any case. (Get it backwards? Oh. Just twist in the other direction.) What interested me at the moment was that I’d surely closed these things thousands of times… and never had to stop and consider — like, “Hmm, which way should I twist this thing for the desired effect?”
Look at the image above. I bet if I asked you to close those blinds so they slant down and in, you’d know which way to twist the wand, wouldn’t you? How did you know to do that?
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Aside: We fairly recently got new “French doors” to the back deck. Their glass (like the glass on the regular windows) is double-paned. However, on the French doors, the panes are separated not by a tiny bit of insulating dead air, but by, oh, maybe a full centimeter or two. Sandwiched between these panes are built-in Venetian blinds, which open and close using a sliding switch at the top of the door: push it to the left to tilt the blinds in one direction, to the right otherwise. (You raise and lower the blinds with a sliding switch on the right side of the pane.) This sliding-switch thing still trips me up every now and then; I always have to stop to think which way to push it to open/close the blinds in the direction I want.
[The scene: a suburban home in North Florida, USA, during one of the wettest summers on record. The weather forecast for the next thirty-six hours calls for heavy rain, up to ten inches. Because the area right outside the front door tends to accumulate water even in normal rainfall, He has finally decided to tackle the problem head-on; He has left work early on this hot, humid Friday to come home and dig a small trench to draw the expected water away. For Her part, She has been off all day, thanks to Her employer’s “Flex Friday” summer policy. He gets home, changes into shabby clothes, heads outdoors. When He comes back inside at last, She is in the living room, reading, a colorful alcoholic beverage in generously proportioned stemware on the table beside Her.]
After a pause, a bigger boy — a teenager — appears. On his head is a ridiculous bolero hat, on his upper body a flashy silk shirt, on his upper lip a patently false pencil-thin mustache; tucked into the hat is what seems to be a bushel of thick black hair. He’s leaning over, striking a would-be “artistic” pose, something he picked up from dancing school, and he’s grinning — grinning, crookedly, for all he’s worth.
I don’t have real pictures of my Dad to correspond to all these memories. But if I could keep only one of the real ones, I know which it would be: any of three or four taken at about the mid-point of his life. He’s got a Budweiser in one hand and a cigarette (a Tareyton: he hadn’t switched yet) in the other… He’s grinning, of course, and why not? His life is in place: he’s happily married, all four of us kids are on the scene, we’re living in the first and only house he and Mom would ever own or ever need.
Dad could be a lively conversationalist. When he talked, I loved his facial expressions, especially: the goggle eyes and slackened jaw of bogus shock; the steep, steep, steeply-angled furrows of his brow (we joked he could hold pencils there) that seemed to say, “What in the hell are you talking about?!?”; the fake teeth-gnashing as he pretended to bite his tongue at someone else’s idiotic remark that he’d only get in trouble for responding to… Dad was, in short, a great mugger.
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