Arts and culture

Directions for this passage: Numbered portions are marked [n]…[/n] (underlined on paper, highlighted online). Each numbered portion matches the question with the same number. Paragraphs are numbered for reference.

Letters on the Glass

Paragraph 1 The summer I turned seventeen, I spent most afternoons in Teodor Varga’s sign shop on Mercer Avenue, a [1]narrow, cluttered room[/1] that smelled of turpentine and burnt coffee. Mr. Varga had painted signs by hand for more than fifty years. Nearly every bakery window, barbershop door, and hardware-store awning in Ashby Falls carried his lettering, although few of the people who passed those signs each day knew his name.

Paragraph 2 I had asked to work for him because I wanted to learn lettering, but for the first three weeks Mr. Varga did not let me near a customer’s sign. Instead, he had me paint a single letter, a capital R, on sheets of old newsprint, hundreds of times a day. When I complained that I [2]could of learned[/2] the entire alphabet in the time I had spent on one letter, he only laughed. “You would have learned it badly,” he said.

Paragraph 3 The lesson, I eventually understood, was about the brush. A lettering brush has long, soft bristles, and a painter shapes each stroke by pressing, lifting, and turning the brush in one continuous motion. Mr. Varga could pull a perfect curve without seeming to think about it. My first curves wobbled, thickened, and [3]totally bombed[/3] in the middle, like a road drawn by someone riding in the back of a pickup truck.

Paragraph 4 By August, Mr. Varga let me help with a real job: the name of a new bookstore, PAPER LANTERN, painted in gold capitals across its front window. He outlined each letter on the glass and left the thick downstrokes to me. I had practiced for so many weeks that my hand no longer shook. [4]Nevertheless,[/4] my strokes came out as smooth as his, and when we stepped back onto the sidewalk to look, I could not tell which parts of the letters I had painted.

Paragraph 5 The bookstore has changed owners twice since then, but the gold letters are still on the window. [5]I walk past them on my way to work.[/5] Mr. Varga retired the year after I left for college, and he never signed a single window. Still, anyone who knows how to look can find him in the letters he left all over Ashby Falls.