My second ‘65th year challenge to myself’ dawned on me slowly. Mostly because I was rushing around finishing projects before I met my friend for dinner prior to heading over to an antique typewriter display together – before all of which I had stopped for coffee with a different friend along the way. I’ve always dashed around from task to task, to a point where people I used to work with called me Sprint. That compulsion hasn’t always been serving me well in my later years, when what I really want to do is saunter, stop and smell the roses.
‘Time for Typewriters’ was a perfect outing. Every writer is a bit obsessed with typewriters and I think almost everyone over 50 would be, but the woman who shared her antique collection was only about 30. She told us she had started off with just one because she wanted her toddler to learn the alphabet, but didn’t want her on a computer. Then she realized how different typewriters are from one another – the size, type, feel, different fonts. Some are stylish, others rattle letters off like a gun, all end the line with a ding that reminds you to crank the silver carriage-return handle to the next row.
There was a War Remington on which the keyboard looked more like a calculator, because there were many fewer buttons as they took away everything that wasn’t necessary – no back bar, no bell. One was called Quiet Deluxe, which might have seemed quiet at the time but you can’t be any sort of typewriter without being super loud. When I first started out in journalism, every newspaper office clanged with people’s fingers hitting the keys and then keys striking the paper. Now it’s just pretty much quiet, which is deluxe.
We found all of them to be hard on the fingers, as we made our way around the big table where they were on display, plopping down in front of each and pressing firmly to type a few sentences on yellow sheets of paper. People added their thoughts about the experience to those papers: “Hello? No spell correct.” “I found the hashtag key #!” The oldest machine was from the 1940s and to type an exclamation mark, you had to use a single quotation mark and then backspace to make a period under it.
They all have their history. I’m so glad I slowed down enough to get a feel for each one and to think of the people who would have been typing on them through the different eras. And to feel a sense of gratitude for my computer with its effortless keyboard, bells and whistles, and access to massive amounts of really cute dog videos!
Visit Sandy’s website at LifeInRetirement.ca
