Typewriter #2
My Smith Corona sits in a hard case in the barn covered with dust. Every few years David threatens to take it to the dump as he trips over it trying to find something else. I want it to be accessible, not buried too deeply behind the doll house, stacks of chairs and the airconditioner. It is something I will probably never use again but it feels essential to existence. If I left home, I’d grab my typewriter on the way out.
I loved the quiet hum it made when I turned it on. I loved threading thin erasable paper onto the rubber reel, turning the knob until the onion skin appeared in front ready to go, adjusting it just a little to be sure it was straight. I loved the mechanics of a letter at the end of each metal arm, the inked ribbon moving up to meet it and thunking down again. It felt important to sit down at the machine and get to work, putting my ideas in print. I wrote all my papers on it, bending forward with a grainy eraser late into the night, hoping the correction wouldn’t show. This machine was at my side all through college. We left home together and never moved back.
It spoke to me with a soft “ding” at the end of every line to notify me that it was time to reach up with my left hand and pull the carriage across to start a new line. It made sounds, it was noisy. Even though it was electric, state of the art in its time, I still had to attack the keys with force to get the results I wanted. Maybe in some way, I attacked the ideas I was writing with the same force. You had to be sure when you wrote on that machine. There was no turning back.
My computer is quiet. The only sound that can be heard when I use it is the thumping of my fingers on the keys and the thud of my thumb on the space bar. I watch the hands of those younger than I hover over a keyboard, typing without a sound. I can’t seem to refrain from the definitive strike on each letter. Old habits die hard.
3 comments:
Hanging on each word, Barb.
Imagine what the typewriter is "thinking"...
"Maybe, just maybe, she'll visit the barn today...
And dust me off.
Or type a letter...like before.
Here she comes...looking for something...over here!!
Oh, she's going back to the house...
Maybe tomorrow."
Ding
great repitition and detail....you take me there w/ your skillfully crafted words. how lucky you are you learned to type, I peck and it's dreadful, believe me!
I have few fond memories of typewriters.
Having learned to type in the Marine Corps, my first typewriter was in college and, thereby, enveloped in the not so fond memory of term papers, typos, white-out, and piles of crumpled paper discarded about my desk in pre-dawn hours.
When I began my work life after college, the typewriters were largely symbolic of the hold that men had long held over women in the workplace.
The advent of the PC probably did as much as anything to liberate women professionally as anything else.
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