ode to the typewriter

As far as I have been able to sniff out, there are only two typewriters remaining in my newsroom. One is on the fritz and the other is next. I may be one of the few employees to despair over these unlamented mechanical corpses, if only because I still find them functional, and, of course, am a romantic for their staccato vibe. I am told there are more of these artifacts on the "third floor," an eerie, unused repository of pica rulers, compositors' tools, hot type, lead letter fittings and, quite possibly, Grace Poole. I'm really not keen on prowling through the third floor, not only because the place gives me the serious creeps, but because I'm convinced my search would be futile. The typewriter is dead. Or perhaps.... not yet. Like most obsolete objects, the typewriter has been seized from the cliff of extinction by a bunch of hipsters who think the retro machine is cool. The New York Times reported on a subculture of "type-ins," where typewriter devotees gather "in bars and bookstores to flaunt a sort of post-digital style and gravitas<$>, tapping out letters to send via snail mail and competing to see who can bang away the fastest." One disciple of these "Unplug and reconnect" love-ins described the soirees as "a jam session for people who like typewriters." And who could not love a typewriter? I didn't, at least not at first, when I sat in front of a gun-metal Royal typewriter in the ninth grade, attending to Mrs. Henninger's thrumming ruler tapping out letters while she barked, "A,S,D, F, semi." I was not a very good typist, or a very fast one. The metal arms of my letters seemed drawn to one another, like a contortionist's limbs, and I spent most of my time wrenching the twisted arms from the guts of the typewriter, my fingertips caking with sooty ink and Mrs. Henninger casting her censorious glare my way. I knew, of course, that success in typing was critical to my career as a journalist and so labored maladroitly away at the task, haplessly painting my compositions with Wite-Out or [JUMP]slipping correction tape into the machine's sights. I made my first foray into journalism covering the high school girls' field hockey team, and my first belabored report was so caulked with correction fluid that my mother took one look at it, said, "Gimme that," and sat magnificently erect in front of the Smith Corona and began her magic. My mother was a talented woman. She could sing beautifully in front of thousands of people and she could cook up a swell cauldron of meatballs and stuffed shells in less time than it took most people to pour a bowl of cereal. In a pinch, she could take up a quick hem and knew how to scrub the burned gunk off the percolator to make it sparkle. But I don't think I ever admired my mother as much as when she sat down with my pathetic drivel on high school field hockey and turned it into a percussive symphony. Her back erect, her elbows at 90 degrees, a half a stick of Wrigley's Doublemint gum snapping in her teeth, my mother's fingers walloped those keys with a dexterity matched only by the aural majesty of the performance. The keys crackling, my mother's gum snapping, the bell ringing at the end of the margins, and my mother's meaty whack that sent the carriage back again [--] it was symphonic. With a rip, she tore the page out of the typewriter, handed it to me, and placed the typewriter cover back with a satisfying snap. I was dumbfounded. "Honey, when I was growing up, you knew how to type or you were dead," she said. "The girls who typed the most words per minute [--] no mistakes, you didn't get mistakes [--] got the best jobs." "How were you?" I asked, still stupefied. "Me?" my mother said, plucking the gum out of her mouth and stuffing it into a metallic wrapper. "I was the best." I would think of my mother in the lonely night hours in my college newsroom, a sinister-looking well of rows and rows of barely operational manual typewriters lorded over by an AP wire machine that pealed out news alerts with the trill of an ice cream truck. There was something delicious about all those typewriters waiting to be manhandled in a syncopated roar to produce something coherent and credible. Perhaps that is why I still seek out the lone operational typewriter to mash a few words together. I like the thwack of the inked metal on the fibrous paper, the imperfection of the letters, the forceful blurring of the ink, the physical joy of hearing a letter hit its object. My letters are still smeared with correction fluid and sullied by xxxxx's. But I think I'm getting faster. I think I'm catching up to my mother.