I miss my old typewriter. Office furniture grey, it was as solid and square as the decade of the fifties when it was manufactured. My grandmother had purchased it for the mundane purpose of typing up wills and deeds. Though her everyday work was the gas station and general store she and my grandfather ran more like a micro-charity than a business, she’d earned her degree from Albany Law School near the start of the twentieth century. Only the second woman in the state to do so, I was told. But unlike her brother Wyllis, the town lawyer for nearby Corinth (pronounced K-rinth by those in the know) she never argued a case in court. Marrying my grandfather, the semi-literate, dark-skinned hired man working her parents’ farm, had put the kibosh on that. Or so I heard one of the customers at the store whisper to another when I was only six and they thought I couldn’t hear them. Little pitchers have big ears. To me, that typewriter was as magical as an Arabian Nights carpet. I could lever myself up into my grandmother’s chair. Look at the letters on each key, carefully choosing them one by one. Then thrust down hard with my index fingers as if each of them was the beak of a chicken pecking for the kernels of corn I’d strewn that morning in the hen yard after slopping the hogs. And just like that, moving so fast that they were blurred, little metal arms would leap up to strike the white paper my grandmother had rolled onto the platen for me. Leaving real letters, ink-black shapes adding up into words. Sometimes as I did that my grandfather would walk past the dining room table where Grandma had set me up, balanced precariously on a thick sofa cushion so I could reach the keys, my legs dangling. He would look over my shoulder at the sheet, pretending to read the mishmash I’d created there. (Not that it would have meant much more to him if I’d been constructing actual sentences and words. Reading the paper each day meant mostly looking at the pictures. I’d sometimes see him holding THE SARATOGIAN upside down as he perused it.) “You done real fine, Sonny,” he’d say, his hand on my shoulder. And I’d feel the same pride I would ten years later when, the year after my grandmother died of bone cancer, he came to every one of my high school wrestling matches. Or when he drove his old Plymouth all the way out to Cornell to see me while I was away at college, and said those same words as I handed him a copy of the school literary magazine THE TROJAN HORSE with my first published poem in it and he pretended to read it. The words “unconditional love” could have had a picture of my grandfather under them. I had written that first published poem on that same old marbled grey machine. I’d taken Grandma’s typewriter to college with me. It was still years before the advent of the electric typewriters that would replace it, the electronic ones that would push those aside, the word processors and increasingly small personal computers that would make even a sleek portable typewriter from the sixties look like a horse and buggy next to a Lamborgini. But let me balance that nostalgia with a little reality. As you might expect, me being a Libra. Life was not always easy with that typewriter. It was only portable in the sense that a fifty-pound barbell is portable. Our first apartment in Ithaca was up three flights of stairs. When my new bride Carol and I moved in, dragging the sofa up those steps was easier than lugging that Remington. When I put it down on the card table I had intended to use as a desk, the table’s four legs splayed out like an overloaded burro. I had a brief vision of it going through the floor to the apartment beneath and then the one below that. As had happened that very year to a friend of mine’s king-sized water bed when he filled it up for the first time in an attic apartment in a rickety tenement on Stewart Avenue. That typewriter was heavy enough to have been used as a ship’s anchor. And there were times when I felt like deep-sixing it. Such as when the keys jammed in the middle of typing up a paper due in two hours for my British Lit class. Or when I had to change the ribbon. Ribbon? you may say. Your old typewriting machine wore a ribbon? For those less superannuated than myself, let me explain that unlike the cartridges clicked into your printers, our antique devices made use of a slender strip of inked cloth yards long. It was strung through a series of intricately crafted moving and stationary parts to pass between the raised letters of the keys that struck said ribbon and the paper that received the impression. Delightfully primitive. And when the end of that ribbon was reached, it would cleverly reverse its direction and roll back the other way, strike by strike. I’ve probably lost you. Suffice to say that with any typewriter ribbon, inevitably the point was reached when the inked strip of cloth had given its last. When the letters on the paper were too faint to read. And then you had to CHANGE…THE…RIBBON. A task not for the faint of heart, but well suited for those with the colorfully metaphoric vocabulary of a sailor. Imagine a ribbon unsatisfactorily threaded--resulting in the machine producing no results on the page. Far worse, a ribbon becoming twisted and caught in the gears. And, even when the time-consuming task of installation was successful, picture your hands resembling those of a recently arrested felon after having been fingerprinted. There was a poetry reading I went to in the 70s where a frighteningly prolific friend of mine was one of the readers. As I greeted her I had one of those “should I or shouldn’t I?” moments. Should I remark that her new white dress is lovely? Should I also tell her I could surmise that after putting on that dress she must have both been struck by inspiration and changed her typewriter ribbon? Those days of ribbon-imprinted garments are now long gone. As are the use of ink erasers, correction ribbons, and liquid paper to fix typing errors now easily amended on the friendly screen. Writing is infinitely more hassle-free and fluid when you can type on your keyboard, use mouse or touchpad to delete or change, save as many versions as you like in a notebook-sized device that weighs much less than a ream of paper. And print it all with one click on the icon. I am not a technophobe, longing for the good old days. But not wishing to be back at that dining table with my tongue between my teeth, my fingers seeking the right keys to make the words “Starz brite lst nite” appear on the snowy field of the page, doesn’t mean that I don’t miss that time. Miss the sound of my grandmother in the kitchen making breakfast for us. The feel of Grampa’s hand on my shoulder. His voice saying “You done fine.”
Posted on: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 22:16:22 +0000
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