As for my own history with the typewriter, let me explain.
For my 12th birthday I asked my parents for a typewriter. My father looked at me as if I were an alien species, a bird from another planet. He could not understand why I would waste a birthday wish on something as useless as a typewriter. "What are you going to do with it?" he asked.
"Type on it," was my reply.
You ask a stupid question . . . .
My parents, I know, lived to regret that first manual typewriter--a blue Corolla that became, even way back then, my pecking companion in the wee hours of the night. I wrote my first "real" stories on that typewriter, mainly science fiction and humor, and learned many years later (from my mother) that my 7th grade English teacher, Ms. McGee, thought I had "great potential."
Perhaps that was enough. But in high school I wasted another birthday wish on an electric typewriter and received, this time, a sleek, blue Corolla with both ribbon and erasable cartridges. Here I typed my first lengthy work, including a few book-length manuscripts, and this was the typewriter that saw me through both college and seminary.
Looking back, I don't know how I managed to type those lengthy papers on this machine, but that typewriter was definitely a workhorse. And there was a special kinship between writer and typewriter, an affinity stirruped to the keyboard, with words flowing from the mind, to the fingers, to the white bond paper with a sharp blat blat blat blat that is missed now with our quiet, humming PCs.
Even yet, there is something that stirs in me, a desire to type. Writing on a typewriter actually made a person feel like a writer. Typewriters, after all, are made for writing.
Happy national typewriter day.
2 comments:
I had a selectric typewriter that I absolutely loved. I typed over 100 words per minute on that thing. Probably because of all the piano lessons. In any case, the skills I learned on that typewriter have put my children through college. It's a lost art!
I liked those selectrics, too. I'm not sure how many words a minute I could, or do, type. I know that typing was the worst grade I received in high school, but it's now the only "skill" I use every day.
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