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A love that has lasted

Thank goodness the days of typewriters and carbon copies are over, lest I kill several dozen trees at one sitting, the way I'm writing tonight.  A severe case of Writer's Block.  I started on another topic only to quickly begin to choke and sputter, spinning my wheels in the mud until I was so deep into a crappy piece of writing I had no other choice but to cut the engine.  Abort.  Restart.  Thank goodness that with the advent of modern-day technology known as computers, and one quick swoop of highlight-and-DELETE, the evidence of tonight's sputtering has been cleared from existence, and I'm not sitting in a pile of crumpled-up papers ripped fervently from the jaws of an old-fashioned typewriter. Mind you, I am quite fond of those old-fashioned typewriters and by that I don't mean the electric kind, I mean the kind before that, the manual ones with keys that you really had to give 'er with, hammering them down so the metal arm would smash hard enough onto the ribbon to leave the imprint of the letter on the paper you'd rolled into the machine via the rolly-bar.  That's the kind of typewriter I learned to type on.  Yeah I'm dating myself, I know.  But hold on, that was at my grandparents' house.  They just didn't have a computer yet (still don't; never will).  But computers did exist.  Really they did.  I think. So it was on such a typewriter that I learned to type, and although I'm sure "rolly-bar" is not the proper name for it, that's what I called in at my young age, and it was one of my favourite parts of the typing process.  There was nothing like the feeling of lining up a crisp sheet of blank white paper against the back of that rolly-bar, and once I was sure it was absolutely, perfectly level I'd roll that rolly-bar until the first glimpse of that paper appeared at the front of the rolly-bar, ready for me to fill it with whatever words of wisdom I had to share that day. In the beginning of my foray into the world of typing, sometimes my words of wisdom consisted of the profound "a b c d e f g.....", or the stunning yet captivating list of the names of everyone in my family, pets included.  Yes I was young when QWERTY and I first became acquainted, but although my thoughts (and the words I could spell) were short, it was the beginning of a long, enduring love affair with the keyboard. For Christmas when I was about nine years old, Santa Claus made all of my dreams come true when he brought me my very own working typewriter.  It was made of sturdy yellow plastic, with white keys and black lettering, and to this day it might just be my absolute very favourite Christmas present of all time (followed in a close second by the Smash Up Derby set I got when I was four years old).  I still have a photo up in one of my memento boxes of that momentous Christmas morning:  me in my white Christmas dress with a little blue ribbon at the collar (give me a break people, it was the early 80's...), sitting cross-legged on the floor with my yellow typewriter squarely on the floor in front of me, typing (with my index fingers) what would surely become the masterpiece of that year.  "...h i j k l m n o p..." I have no idea what I actually wrote that day. But I do think that if I ever have some money burning a hole in my pocket and I've nothing better to spend it on, and I find myself with some space in a spare room that's just begging for a little history, I might even like to buy one of those old antique typewriters to have in my house.  Not the yellow plastic kind, and not to actually type on; just to set on an antique-looking desk so that I've got a piece of nostalgia to gaze upon.  So that my son has even more evidence for how archaic I am.  And we all have a reminder of how far we've come; or at least how many trees we are saving.

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©2023 by Kelly Wagner

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