A trip to Eaton's department store was high on the joy list when I was a kid. Opportunities for exploration abounded. I would dream of being locked in the store overnight - able to run around unsupervised, jumping on the mattresses, running down the up escalator, trying on the clothes and jewelry, nosing into all the books. A visit to the shoe department on the fifth floor where they had a shoe fitting machine/x-ray machine installed was the height of delight. All the kids found this device utterly fascinating...you could look in the viewfinder and actually see the bones in your feet. The machine was a marketing gimmick installed by many department stores during that time period. The picture of my feet and bones - watching my skeletal toes wiggling, watery white on black, was mesmerizing and we couldn't get enough of it. The shoe guy would admonish us with the usual "This is not a toy". But we would wait until his back was turned or he went into the stock room, then push and shove to have a turn. The machines were poorly built and leaked radiation all over the place, we found out later. In those days we were innocent of environmental hazards - we would run with glee behind the mosquito fogger which was spraying DDT all over the city. Who knows how really damaged our DNA is?
My father had bits of shrapnel in his body, left from WW1. Once in a while he'd get a bump somewhere and inside the bump would be a small piece of metal. I imagined that his foot x-ray would show little bits of metal like pepper all over his feet.
I would have liked the chance to see inside my Dad, clanging along full of metal.
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