The assignment was "First Memory"
I don’t remember my exact age, but I can remember clearly
the clacking sound the keys made as they sprang up to slap a ribbon of ink
against white unlined paper: the height of gravitas and adulthood to a young
kid who’d only been allowed to work in pencil on dull wide-lined newsprint. It
was Army Green with a black irregular pentagon shaped crest on the front panel
that read Royal in engraved creamy-gold letters. My grandfather had died years
before, but his office remained unchanged, and anytime my grandmother would
babysit, I would hound her for hours so that I could sit at a huge wooden desk
that had once belonged to him, and tap the time away until my parents came to
collect me.
As a fairly unsentimental adult, I can’t deny the
significance of sitting there surrounded by the belongings of a man I would
only know by the stories my aunts and cousins told of him, and the things he’d
left behind. The caramel colored art eraser and triangular ruler in his desk drawer,
and the smell of onion skin carbon paper, and envelope glue, were as much a
part of him as the collection of carefully displayed mugs, and beer steins,
that circled the whole room on handmade shelves. For all I know his hands may
never have touched the keys of that big green machine, but I always believed
that they had, and that was enough for the connection to be real to the child I
used to be.
I had not, yet, learned cursive in school, but I was already
a better two-fingered-typist than printer. I had a tendency to forget how to
shape certain letters, or reverse their direction. Someone said I had dyslexia,
without much explanation of what that meant. I knew I had difficulty reading
quickly, and hated to read aloud. I made lots of mistakes, but how many of
those mistakes were nerves and how many because I wasn’t good at reading, I
don’t think anyone knew. What I knew, is that my problems with printing
disappeared sitting at that massive green machine, poking away at the clear
acrylic buttons that protected parchment colored letters, what were framed with
silver: some more worn than others. I
could memorize where the letters were, and never have to worry again about how
to shape them with a pencil. Unfortunately for me, school wasn’t filled with
big wooden desks, and heavy steal typewriters.
The machine made a kind of music. I loved the way the
carriage mechanism thumped up and down to accommodate the pressing of a shift
key. By pressing, I mean, shoving it with my whole hand, it took so much strength
to move that heavy rubberized roller up and down. The clack-click, clack-click,
clack-click, clack-click, clacking of the keys, the fast double click of a
spacebar, and then a thump-thump-clack-click, clack-click, clack-click, of the begging
of a new sentence reminded me of snare, and bass drums. It made a funny hick-up
sound when I pressed the backspace key to type the right letter multiple times
over a wrong one, and at the end of each row a very satisfying ding-zip-thump
of the carriage return ratcheting back to the beginning of the next line so
that the impromptu melody could start again.
Sometimes I’d push the carriage return arm over, and over
listening for the rolling dull clunk of the spacing gears change from single,
to double, to triple, and back as I moved the lever with my opposite hand.
Tapping the enter key on a computer, or even an electric typewriter, just doesn’t
have the same gratifying sense. Then there was the ratcheting sound the roller
made as you loaded a whole sheet of blank paper, and a shiny metal roller-guild
sprang back into place: the sound of possibility.
It didn’t yet occur to me that this device could be used to
record the thoughts and stories in my head, I just liked the sound it made, and
how terribly adult I felt pretending to write terrible adult things in
permanent ink. Back then I held two
contrary beliefs, that I still struggle with today. One is that everyone made up
stories in their head, and the other, that it was not OK for gown-ups to make
up stories in their heads. I kept my typing to the basics, the alphabet, the
full names of my family members, cousins, teachers, and pets. Sometimes I would
just type gibberish to see how fast I could go without locking up the keys, and
sometimes I would deliberately try to tangle up as many keys as possible. It was a dangerous game: if I tangled so many
keys I had to ask for adult intervention I’d be made to stop playing with my
favorite toy, and if I didn’t press my luck I’d be stuck unsatisfied, convinced
I could have ensnared one more key. I wasn’t just fascinated with the letters
imprinted on the page, and sometimes on the roller I had hit the key so hard, I
also loved the mechanics of the heavy machine. The way one lever pressed would
physically translate to a small metal arm raising out of a curved chassis to
strike the page, leave its mark, and then return just as quickly to its well-ordered
resting place. When I was strong enough, I would turn the whole thing over to
see if I could watch the interaction of springs and levers that made the typing
happen.
My attraction wasn’t limited to my grandfather’s typewriter.
My maternal grandparents had a Jet Black Underwood with black and white keys.
Much more sophisticated with more buttons that I didn’t know how to use, but
opportunities to play with that machine were limited. It wasn’t, in my
grandmother’s opinion, an appropriate occupation for young boys, even if it did
stop my non-stop fidgeting. The music I made on that machine was just noise to
her easily irritated ears. At home, my parents had a Gunmetal Grey, Smith and
Corona “Silent Secretary” that was anything but silent. That machine had its
own pitch and music, and I was more prone to be careless when playing on it,
the machine being ours, and all. The piece de résistance, lie dormant in our
attic, for me to find a few years later: a Remington Portable with retractable
keys. The Remington had certain quirks, the ribbon was near frayed through and
no replacements were available, the carriage return would slide clear out of
the machine and it tended to drop certain letters if you typed too quickly. It
was temperamental. I had its own ideas about line spacing, typing speed, and
what noises it should, and should not make. But then, what could you expect, it
had been in The War.
