Keyboards

I first wrote about input in this post about keyboards. I’ve always liked typewriters, or so I thought for the longest time. I had a beige IBM Selectric that I wrote TV scripts and documentaries on in the 1980s. After following a tip from a friend, I bought it off the back of a truck in New York, in Hell’s Kitchen, and it was most certainly stolen. The Selectric came in a bloody box that recently held dead chickens, judging from the feathers inside and sticky red stuff that looked like blood. It was an excellent machine, silent when I wasn’t typing, and satisfyingly noisy when I was.

I still have the blue and white Smith-Corona that I wrote most of my plays on in the 1970s and early 80s. It turned on with chug sound, an inertial thud of some sort of flywheel spinning up. It was a hybrid machine, sleekly electric for its era, but also clumsy and mechanical, prone to jams. I pretty much forgot about it the basement of the house I left after getting divorced. One day, my son brought the typewriter over to me, along with the box of old stories. I turned it on. The same old chug sound. I tried some typing. Didn’t get far. The keys tangled up on themselves. I put it back in the box and put the box in a closet and that was that. I thought I would leave the past behind but it wasn’t to be.

Around 2006, I had one more go at typewriters. It was the year that my mother died and my divorce was final. I sought…