Until my wife bought our 9-year-old granddaughter a typewriter for Christmas, I didn't know that such writing machines were still being made.
It's much easier, after all, to light up a computer screen than to roll two sheets of paper around a rubber platen and then fill the top sheet with words hit one letter at a time: Tap, tap, tap. Ding! Carriage return.
I suppose just about everyone can type these days, thanks to the infectious spread of keyboards of all sorts. Some people hunt and peck; others are speedy and accurate; still others seem to think all they need to send a message is two quick thumbs.
It was with a touch of embarrassment, then, that I admitted to my old high school friend Jack recently that I had made a D in typing class during our senior year. That was the first D I ever made, I said in our telephone conversation, and it gave me as much pain as that Royal manual typewriter that I had used in Mrs. Rink's class.
All I knew for sure was to rest my fingers on the home keys: ASDF for the left hand and JKL; for the right. The keys were unmarked, I never really figured out where the remaining letters and numbers were hidden away.
The only comfort I got from my report card was the realization that typing was a chore I would never be bothered with.
"Think again, Clumsy," Fate suggested, and so I went into newspapers, where typewriter keyboards, and later, computer keyboards, filled newsrooms.
I got little pity from Jack. He reminded me that he had failed freshman college English, which would have been acceptable had his daughter Betsy not recently become a teacher of freshman college English.
"Yes, I did fail freshman English," he wrote in an e-mail after our conversation. "I failed it so bad I quit school for a year in anticipation of being drafted."
(I think Jack meant "badly," not "bad," but I didn't say anything, because I'm sure he already has to walk on eggshells around his daughter, the English teacher.)
"You see the irony here," Jack wrote, but added: "I am really proud of her, and I think she is a really great writer."
Still, he said that he often pleads with Betsy to go easy on the struggling freshmen in her college class.
Jack was able to sidestep Fate: He became a banker, in which math probably gets more play than English. Anyway, I've heard him brag about his family often, and that certainly carries more weight in Life 101 than a faded college transcript.
As for me, typing wasn't so hard to learn once I had to depend on it to eat. Over the years, my fingers have tapped out a lot of bragging about my own children and grandchildren.
Jack and I both turned out all right, you see; we just got off to slow starts.
CHRISTMAS PAST: My sister, Arlene, called at Christmas, and as we reminisced at our childhood Christmas gifts, I was reminded of the typewriter our parents bought me when I was in the eighth grade.
It was the real thing, a portable from the Sears store. It gave me a feeling of power over the written word -- which was even more important when you consider the quality of my handwriting.
What it didn't give me, though, was speed or skill. I typed one finger at a time, which helps explain that D in my senior year.
BY THE WAY: Happy birthday, JoAn. Look behind the curtain.
Reach Glynn Moore at (706) 823-3419 or glynn.moore@augustachronicle.com.
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