The other day I tried to explain what a typewriter is to my friend’s kid. He’s five. This was not just an abstract thing. We were at a friend’s house and I casually mentioned how I would really like to get an old typewriter and fix it up, and my friend said “Oh I have one; you can have it.” And sure enough, he opened up this secret annex in the wall and pulled out a dusty, musty old Smith Corona from the 70s. This was exciting. I love hoarders.
Dash was very curious about the typewriter. “What is that?” I then proceeded to offer up one of the most inane descriptions I have ever mustered:
“It’s this machine that we used to use for writing letters, before we had computers.”
I then tried to think of one single other thing you can do with a typewriter, aside from school essays, but I couldn’t.
Nonplussed, Dash started banging away at the decrepit old keys and watching in glee as the typebars (I had to look this word up, see drawing below) jammed all up against the ribbon spool in a cluster.
“Easy, Dash,” I said. “Typewriters can’t handle it when you type that fast.” I gently pried each typebar back into its socket and showed him how we used to delicately press on the tactile little keys to make letters fly one at a time, rendering every letter to the IRS a piece of poetry.
Of course, the ink was dried up on this typewriter after its God-knows-how-long exile in the Anne Frank annex, so there was nothing happening. But it brought back so many memories to even faux-type on this disproportionately heavy block of rusty, dusty, moldy nostalgia.
I cannot emphasize enough how not impressed Dash was. He went back to playing video games almost immediately. But I stayed in my typewriter reverie for quite a while. Even if it’s just an impressive paperweight now, it’s still a beautiful ode to just how badly we care about writing.
