My Mother’s Typewriter

The beginning of a relentless obsession

My mother arrived at Ellis Island in America with a two-year-old little boy, a belly that was 8 months pregnant, two suitcases, and a typewriter case that held the typewriter that she had been using for the previous 7 years. After a long day of endless red tape she finally made it to Penn Station where she caught a train for Kentucky where her American husband awaited her arrival.

A month later I was born, on American soil; an American. The first gift my mother gave to me was life. A dozen years later she would give me her typewriter.

With my American father being in the military, over the next decade or so the family moved constantly. The family also increased in population with the addition of two younger siblings; both girls. We moved from army base to army base across America then we moved to Europe where we moved from army base to army base then we moved back to America where we moved from army base to army base. In the first 11 years of my life we lived in 9 different places.

We moved to the 10th place right after I finished 5th grade. My father retired from the military (in order to avoid being sent to Vietnam) and we ended up in far, far, far west Texas. That is where I finished my K-12 education.

Before coming to America my mother worked as a secretary. In post-war Germany jobs were scarce — especially for females. But my mother developed a talent that lifted her out of the rubble and poverty her family was in. She learned how to type. But she not only learned how to type but she learned to type faster than just about anyone. She learned to type as fast as anyone could speak. She became the Speedy Gonzalez of German secretaries. Her fingers became like that of celebrated pianists and composers. There were no tape recorders readily available back then but you didn’t need one if my mother was there with her fingers hovering over her beloved typewriter’s keyboard.

It was in seventh grade that I started asking my parents for a typewriter. They asked me why on earth a boy would want a typewriter. I vehemently explained to them that I was going to be a writer when I grew up. How can anyone become a writer if they didn’t know how to type? (Seriously!!!)

So what did my mother do? She went out and bought herself a brand new American electric typewriter and she gave me her old clunky manual German typewriter. It was manufactured in Germany in the late 1940s and it came complete with umlauts and other weird German shit.

Actually, she gave the typewriter to me and my older brother but my brother had no interest in it whatsoever. His tool of choice was a calculator. He was a numbers guy and I was a words guy. So it essentially became my typewriter.

I was already writing a bit back then so I typed up some of my blabberings. It utterly blew my mind to see my words in print, typed out, rather than scrawled out in my chicken scratch penmanship. It literally changed my life! Much to my mother’s chagrin that old typewriter cemented my conviction that I would be a writer. After seeing my words in print there was simply no going back.

There are two gifts from my mother that I will always be grateful for; the gift of life and the gift of that old typewriter.

My mother, however, soon came to regret having given me that typewriter. She was soon doing everything in her power to dissuade me from becoming a writer. Her reasons were far too numerous to list here.

I think I was in eighth grade when I decided to start my own monthly magazine — a magazine containing nothing but my own writing. I typed the whole magazine out on that old typewriter. The problem, of course, is that produced only one copy.

I saw a commercial on TV for a copy machine for just $29.95. I started asking my parents for a copy machine. If I could make multiple copies of that one page then that’s when the big bucks would start happening.

So what did my mother do? For my birthday she gave me a box of carbon paper!

With three sheets of carbon paper between four sheets of blank paper I could type four copies of my monthly magazine at a time! So typing out the magazine three times I could produce twelve copies of the magazine! At twenty-five cents a copy — wait a minute, let me check my brother’s calculator — that comes to three dollars a month! I was fucking rich!

The first three months of the magazine sold out each month. Sales began slipping after that and, since it was so much work, my enthusiasm began slipping, too, so the magazine folded.

Besides, I was then entering high school! There were way too many distractions to stay laboring at that old typewriter.

My family and friends all made fun of me for taking a typing class in high school. But I was going to be a writer so it was imperative that I become as proficient at typing as I could get. (Seriously!!!) By way of explanation I told family and friends how exciting it was to take a class full of nothing but girls. Out of twenty-six students in that class I was the only boy. (Who could deny that logic?)

It was one of the few classes I scored straight A’s in. On the final exam test I scored 129 words per minute with only two errors. Unfortunately, there was one girl who typed 131 words per minute with only one error. Just like so many times in my life I came in second.

Back then I was turned on by girls who bested me so I asked that girl out. Sadly, she declined, explaining that she didn’t want to be known as the girl who dated a nerd boy who typed.

With high school thankfully over, I was freed from slavery and left home to embark on that perilous and mysterious journey of adulthood. My mother’s typewriter stayed behind. I didn’t want to bring anything of her with me. The typewriter belonged in a museum or something.

Over the next three decades of constantly moving from one place to another (a rehashing of my earlier childhood) I bought many, many typewriters. I could simply not live without a typewriter. They were all used. I could never afford a new one. At one point I owned four typewriters. Who the hell needs four typewriters? After all, you can only type on one at a time.

I left so many of those typewriters behind as I moved from one place to another on the spur of the moment with only what I could carry. (Typewriters were heavy back then.)

When I lived in Los Angeles I bought a great electric typewriter at a yard sale that the seller swore on a stack of bibles was once owned by Lucille Ball’s secretary. I absolutely loathe how people give names to inanimate objects like cars and typewriters but I named that typewriter, Red, in honor of Lucille Ball’s hair and the fact that the typewriter was actually red. I wrote a novel on Red — it was one of the novels I fed into a bonfire.

When I was finally in my forties one Christmas Santa Clause left a brand spanking new computer under the Christmas tree. I was already quite familiar with computers thanks to some of the jobs I had plus I was already a lightning fast typist, all I had to do was plug in that computer and I was ready to go.

Once again, my life changed radically. My wife became convinced that I had left her for a computer. My fingers haven’t stopped typing ever since.

Some years later, on her deathbed just a few minutes before she died, I once again thanked my mother for that old clanky typewriter she gave me.

Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved.

And here is a story that has nothing whatsoever to do with typewriters…