It’s one of those up-and-down days

I know it’s time to take a break from writing when I become obsessed with something like, well, escalators. It is similar in its mundanity to suddenly fixating on frying pans and wanting to learn everything about them that you possibly can.

The obsession began on a recent Sunday when I was waiting for my wife, the energetic Cinelli, at a mall in the Valley, where malls are the modern equivalent of Europe’s ancient cathedrals. Tourists of a future millennium will gaze in awe at our massive chapels of commerce and marvel at the hallowed character of their window displays.

I was waiting for Cinelli, which I calculate I have done for approximately one-fifth of our marriage, when, in a kind of somnambulant state, I began watching the steps of an escalator. There was a kind of hypnotic effect to the sameness of their downward movement, slipping into each other and then out again to form stairs, and then in again, and out again.

“I wonder,” I said to a young woman manning a nearby cellphone sales booth, “how many steps there are to an escalator like this?”

She observed me in the open-mouthed manner of clerks everywhere and said, “Huh?” which is a not-unfamiliar response from those hired to serve the public. I asked a clerk at a bakery once if they sold sourdough bread and she backed off and stared in a manner that was both horrified and disgusted. I can’t imagine what she must have thought I said, but her reaction was so severe that I just left, breadless.

“I wonder how many steps there are to an escalator like this?” I said again to the cellphone person.

“Seventy-two?” she said. It was a good guess, but it was mostly an effort to conclude our brief conversation. I had noticed earlier that she was viewing me with suspicion, like I was an old dog in his lusting years hanging around Victoria’s Secret.

“Are you bothering people again?” Cinelli said as she approached, observing the discomfiture of the clerk and my poised-to-strike position, ears flattened back, head thrust forward. “Forgive him,” she said to the woman, “he’s in his angry years.”

“I was just discussing the escalator,” I explained to Cinelli as we walked toward the car, a dusty and dented 4-year-old Camry that I am vowing to have undented and painted one of these days.

“Did you say anything dirty?” Cinelli asked. “Young women don’t mind talking dirty, but only to their good friends.”

I explained that there is nothing dirty about escalators. They are actually amazingly simple and useful devices that date to around 1900, when they were known as inclined elevators and magic staircases. Charles Seeberger, who designed the forerunner of the modern escalator, was the one who finally called them escalators, combining the words “elevator” and “scala,” the Latin word for “steps.”

“That’s nice, dear,” Cinelli said when I shared my research with her. We were home by then and she was trying to concentrate on Howard Rosenberg’s new book, “Not So Prime Time: Chasing the Trivial on American Television.” Rosenberg was this newspaper’s TV critic for 25 years until he retired in ought-three. I would not have let him go. I would have locked him in a cubicle with a cot, a sink, a toilet and a computer, and fed him through a slot in the door. I would have allowed him weights and occasional visits by tattoo artists. Cinelli has always loved Howard and she loves his book, and I will love his book when I get my hands on it.

“The only thing I wonder about it is the picture of him smiling,” she said. “People like you and Howard don’t look right smiling.”

“Did you know,” I said, “that the longest freestanding escalator in the world is in the CNN Center in Atlanta? It’s eight stories high.” Silence. “You didn’t know that, did you?”

“No, dear.”

“ ‘Mangled hands and feet, lacerated tendons, broken or cut off fingers and toes.’ ”

“What?”

I knew that would get her attention.

“Those are injuries suffered on escalators, according to SeniorSite.com. Goodbyemag.com reports that a man was strangled in London when his clothing became entangled in an escalator. It would seem like an unpleasant way to go, not to mention the embarrassment of having to explain his death to family and friends.”

“You’re a sick man, Elmer.”

“I am just trying to alert you to dangers that abound in our electrified, automated, easy-living society. Here’s a woman who fell on an escalator in Miami and was crushed under the weight of her fellow passengers who fell on top of her. And a woman in New York was escalated to death when the steps collapsed and she fell into the bowels of the machinery. And here’s ...”

Cinelli put down her book. “I see the signs,” she said. “You’re due for either a vacation or a lobotomy. Which will it be, Tiger?”

The vacation.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.