Give Me a Keyboard That Clicks...

According to stories that have popped up on Facebook, typewriters are back "in." One story was accompanied by a photo of a Smith-Corona Galaxie Deluxe in gold, the same typewriter that I received as a much-coveted Christmas gift in 1971.

Oh, it was my old crush all over again.

I fell in love with words at a very young age. Even as the tiniest child I would ask my mother when she returned from a trip downtown "Did you bring me a book?" rather than "Did you bring me a toy?" From when I was midway through elementary school I ran through spiral-bound notebooks at an alarming rate, filling them with fantasy/spy/animal stories populated with all my favorite characters from television series, a place where Timmy and Lassie knew Maxwell Smart and John Monroe, plus later characters I created who were based on favorite actors like Michael Keating and Tom Baker. But my greatest wish was a typewriter.

Dad, however, was very insistent: I couldn't have a typewriter until I learned to type (it wasn't "keyboarding" in those days); he didn't want to see me hunched over like a vulture in hunt-and-peck mode. Happily, among the delights of ninth grade was typing class; everyone at Hugh B. Bain learned to type, even the boys who just took shop. Seated in front of gigantic Underwood manual typewriters, heavy, stolid, metal, and grey, Miss Rossi set us through exercises of "F-F-F-F space" and "J-J-J-J space" and so on, adding upper rows and lower rows and numbers and symbols until muscle memory took over our typing skills. We eventually surpassed "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" to incomprehensible sentences with plenty of Z's and X's and digits with dollar signs and percentages.

I discovered a handicap for myself early on: Miss Rossi would pass by my desk and admonish "Keep your fingers on the home keys!" Alas, these manual machines were made for full-grown women and men with large hands. My hands were always small and my fingers short and even my own classmates' hands were larger than mine; I simply could not hold down the shift key and still reach to keep my fingers on the home keys. When I demonstrated this to Miss Rossi she sighed, having no easy answers for puny hands, and told me to do the best I could. Plus typing on a manual typewriter was a lot like driving a car without power steering; you needed a lot of strength to keep it going. Talk about a ten-finger exercise (or rather a nine-finger one, as the left thumb was rather useless)!

Dad and I had several rather epic disagreements over the years, and the typewriter for Christmas became one of them. The budget in our household being very tight, Dad wanted to buy me a Royal portable, which was a perfectly serviceable model (legions of reporters on the battlefield, like Ernie Pyle, would type out World War II reports on battered Royal portables while mortars exploded overhead and bullets hissed by) and would only cost $80. I, however, had been casting covetous eyes at the typewriters at Ann & Hope [think Kmart, the Rhode Island version] for many years now and had set my heart on a Smith-Corona Galaxie Deluxe as pictured above, mainly because it had the newest keyboard, one with a number 1 and an exclamation point key.

Younger keyboard users will not remember, and their older counterparts may have forgotten, that the QWERTY layout changed in just a short time, from when I learned to type in 1971 and when I returned to school for a year in 1981. Note the typewriter above has the quotation mark over the 2 and the apostrophe over the 8. On the key to the right of the colon and semicolon, where now the quotation mark and apostrophe reside, is the at sign (@) and the cent sign (¢). The asterisk (*), which is now over the 8, was instead over the dash, and the underscore (_), now over the dash, was over the 6. The caret (^), now over the 6, did not even appear. However, there was a bigger difference; up until the 70s, most typewriters did not have a key for 1 and !. Instead you typed a small letter "l" for 1 and if you must type an exclamation point—a habit our English teachers steadily tried to break us of—you typed a period, then backspaced and typed the apostrophe. Me, I wanted that 1 and ! key. Dad demurred that he did not have the extra money. I said I'd save it myself, and that's what I did, and handed it over to him soon after my birthday, and on Christmas morning that shiny gold Galaxie Deluxe (in a hard-sided case that made this "portable" typewriter weigh a ton) was under the tree. (I wanted the blue one, but one can't have everything.)

"Writ" served me faithfully until I fell under the spell of an electric Smith-Corona in Murray's [think Best Buy, Rhode Island style] around 1980. I have forgotten the model number, but this typewriter came in both pica and elite type, and having fallen in love with the latter in high school, I was determined to lay my hot little fingers on the elite version. Its other fascination was that it was the first typewriter after the venerable IBM Selectric to have a changeable "ball" so you could type in different typefaces. It practically made me giddy; I could actually type with italics instead of having to underline words to emphasize them or talk about book titles.

(Wait...rewind...pica and elite? Typewriters, of course, did not have proportional type like computers. Your standard typewriter for years wrote in one typeface, the durable Courier, at 10 pitch, in other words 10 characters per inch, and no more and no less than ten. Elite typewriters still used Courier, but a slightly smaller version at 12 characters per inch. Intoxicating to someone who wanted to put more words on the same amount of paper. I was working by then and I did buy that typewriter, and I enjoyed it so that I named it "Treasure," who typed out innumerable letters to friends and several hopeful manuscripts.)

Times change. I later bought an electronic typewriter at Lechmere (for the short time that Massachusetts institution was here in Georgia before it closed), but ended up not using it much because suddenly it was the age of the computer. Using a Commodore 64, a daisy-wheel printer (a creature which composed letters from tiny dots of ink in cacophonous and headache-inducing noise), and a primitive word processing software called Paperclip, I took my first steps into word processing. Next at work came Wang dedicated word processors, with an amazing thing inside them, a "Winchester" disk. This meant you could save, and correct, anything you typed, without having to resort to a floppy disk drive. Finally came a succession of homemade PCs. Back in those days, you could buy "clicky" and "nonclicky" keyboards, and the nice feedback of the "clicky" version helped you hark back to the halcyon days of the sharp snick-snick-snick of metal typebars against the platen [roller], but eventually those mostly disappeared, leaving you with mushy versions including the dreaded "chiclet" keyboard.

But it was with fond memories of Writ and Treasure and several years of IBM Selectrics at work before automation consumed the office that I recently visited MicroCenter with a handful of gift cards kindly given to me upon my retirement and bought a gaming keyboard, the last bastion of the "clicky" generation. Sitting there with the familiar bounce under my fingers and click in my ears, the years fall away. It's suddenly a pleasure again to type.

A Sideboard Always Full

When I turned to page 64 I literally yelped.

I call them my "Christmas porn," the magazines I buy over the holidays just to look at the lush, colorful decorations. Each of the seasons have their colors, but I love the festive hues and the sparkle of Christmas most of all. I usually skip the "Better Homes & Gardens" type periodicals and go in for the glam: a lot for the British magazines, but also things like the "cottage journals." The particular magazine I was looking through was "Holiday Home," filled with marvelous expensive things I could never afford in a lifetime (many which I wouldn't want anyway), lush homes, and even more plush furnishings.

And then I saw this, and it all came flooding back.

My grandfather's (Dad's father) house was built in 1920, when Dad was seven years old, so it was middle-aged when I first knew it and venerable the last time I saw it ten years ago, a Dutch Colonial with a steeply pitched roof to each side interrupted by long gables. It underwent very little redecorating over the years; oh, some wallpaper vanished and the candle wall sconces with it, and somewhere along the line the original kitchen cabinets were replaced with trendy 50s metal ones. The sole bathroom in the house had the original fixtures: black-and-white floor tiles, X-shaped white ceramic faucet handles, a showerless tub. The hardwood floors were scuffed and bowed; the wallpaper up to the second story grimy where numerous hands had reached for assistance on the walls; the stair treads hollowed from footfalls. But it never mattered to me because it was a place where the past intersected with the present, an effect I wrote about in "The Magic House." It was never more so evident on Christmas, when the tree was hung with vintage clear ornaments from World War II, bubble lights, "big bulbs," and waterfalls of tinsel, but even on ordinary days the passage to the past was a very thin veil through which I hungrily peered, trying to make my way to that other side.

So when I turned the page and saw the selfsame sideboard that sat in Grandpa's cellar, covered with a large grey Nativity set, you can imagine how my memories went spiraling back. I have deliberately mirror imaged the illustration to show you the sideboard just the way it would have looked when we entered the house through the outside cellar door, on the left against the wall. It was the first thing you saw when you entered, and at Christmas it was a thing of glory, covered with a big potted poinsettia cradled in red or green foil wrap, flanked on either side by platters of the Italian cookies my Auntie Margaret had been baking for hours: round brown-purple wine biscuits, biscotti-shaped pale almond bars and chocolate-colored molasses cookies, and round golden butterballs rolled in confectioners' sugar (a.k.a. Danish wedding cookies or Mexican wedding cookies). Scattered among the cookies would be tiny boxed individual torrone (Italian nougat candy) with Italian motifs and Hershey's kisses, and a dish of riotous rainbows known as "Christmas candy" and another of Italian hard candy molded in the shapes of slices of oranges, tangerines, and lemons and wrapped in foil picturing the respective fruit. Since horizontal surfaces always gather items, you might find the occasional wrapped Christmas gift there, or tossed aside gloves, house keys, and the usual other homey house items. In the drawers and cupboards below were kept tablecloths and napkins for all seasons, bowls and vases.

Other times of the year called for different decor. During non-holiday times, it might be paper napkins, tobacco tins, tossed-aside mail, a rolled up newspaper, cigar boxes. On Valentine's Day a big heart-shaped box of candy might lay there, tempting a small girl with a sweet tooth. During the summer, ripening tomatoes from Grandpa's flourishing garden perched on the sills of the two small windows which flanked either end of the sideboard like soldiers on patrol, and any overflow would make its way to the sideboard. If it were the season for fresh-picked vegetables, a paper bag of them would be waiting there for us to take home when we left: fat fragrant tomatoes, stolid green zucchini, long emerald cucumbers, fresh garlic, heady onions. At Thanksgiving, the sideboard played host to bowls of mixed nuts in the shell, filberts, almonds, walnuts, pecans, Brazil nuts, and the tarnished silver nutcrackers older than I was, and butternut squash and pumpkin pies with their shiny orangy-brown tops and fluted crust leaving the faint aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg everywhere. There might be a vase of zinnias in the fall or roses in summer, but always in the spring there would be a big jarful of soft grey pussy willows, cut live from the branches, so cuddly and rabbit's-foot-like that they would be irresistible to pet.

Oh, and then it was Easter, and the cookie platters were back, with a wee difference. The heavier cookies were gone and strewn among the wine biscuits and butterballs were egg biscuits, light as a feather and pale brown, coated on top with just the faintest suggestion of white icing, all flecked with a pinch of multicolor sprinkles. Instead of Hershey kisses accompanying the little torrone boxes in their colorful Italian designs, there were small chocolate eggs in Easter pastel finery and occasionally a smattering of jellybeans. It was the time of year for rice pie, and one or two would be waiting there for company, set on the table to be cut into soft sweet pieces and accompanied by the fragrant coffee that always seemed to be percolating on the stove. Bobbing their white heads over it all would be the waxy, pristine branches of the Easter lilies set in a pot with purple or pink or blue foil around it, nodding a spring greeting.

I think of chalk pictures and Mary Poppins, and wish I knew some way to reach into that picture, touch the sideboard, be transported just one more time...

"There's a Place for Each Small One--God Planned It That Way..."

This originally appeared in the Christmas TV History blog as a "Christmas in July" entry in 2014:

The story of The Small One and I go way back. Really way back, to a time when speeds were lower and cars were heavier, and the best place to be on the traditional “Sunday drive” was sitting between Dad and Mom on the broad front seat of a ‘50's Pontiac, snuggled against Mom while we listened to the last vestiges of old-time radio: NBC’s Monitor, the original Gunsmoke with William Conrad as Matt Dillon, and those others struggling against television’s relentless tide.

Except at Christmas. Those late December Sundays and few days before Christmas were still reserved for Christmas stories, and for many years after radio had abandoned itself to all-music/all-news formats, one radio station in town (I believe it was WJAR or perhaps WPRO) still played those well-loved stories on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and it was those broadcasts I remember, Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, Jack Benny Christmas shopping...but especially the tale of a boy and his elderly donkey Small One, retold year after year by Bing Crosby.

In 1978, Disney brought the story of The Small One to film as a half-hour short preceding the re-release of Pinocchio. It was thought an odd choice for Disney, since they usually avoided stories with references to religion, but the story itself was pure Disney: the age-old tale of the friendship between a child and an animal. In The Small One, an unnamed Judean lad has made a pet of one of his father’s work animals, an aged donkey who finds it increasingly difficult to carry loads of firewood. When the impoverished woodcutter finally tells his son that he can no longer afford to keep Small One if he can’t work and will be taking the donkey into town to sell, the grieving boy offers to do the task himself, determined to find his friend a good home.

And there, onscreen, was the story I remembered from those Christmas Eves years before: the boy’s relationship with Small One, lovingly detailed in play and teamwork; the heart-stopping moment where the boy realizes that there is only one destiny for his pet; their adventures in town, enlivened by the jaunty but cynical “Merchant’s Song”; the final despair that ends in hope when a man named Joseph chooses Small One to carry his wife to Bethlehem. The story is bookended by Don Bluth’s plaintive “Small One” song, which still reduces me to puddling goo each time I play the DVD.

The Small One is a tale of friendship that can be watched in a secular manner as the story of a boy and his pet, or as a story of faith and the first Christmas. But—if I can bear to close my eyes to the lovely animation that long—I can almost, almost turn the clock back to another Christmas story, one of spindly pine trees draped with lead tinsel to fill in the “bald spots,” “big bulb” Christmas lights and vintage 1950s ornaments, the rich scents of molasses and almonds while baking cookies, Christmas Mass with the music of the choir and the organ at full joyful throttle, long-playing records dispensing Perry Como and Nat King Cole, visits to Grandpa with the whole family celebrating in the warm cozy cellar—but most of all of being warm and happy next to Mom as the hum of the car wheels and the lullaby of The Small One take me off to sleep.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The original story by Charles Tazewell.

The Bing Crosby version.

"I Know What Those Are..."

When James first saw Leia as a puppy, he met her mother, a purebred beagle, and was told her father was a cocker spaniel. She was a charmingly sweet dog all her life, "so laid back she was falling over," as in the filksong, an amiable lady who was content to simply rest at James' feet or lie next to his craft room as he was working, but if there was cocker spaniel in her anywhere, it was submerged under more powerful genes. I believe her mom had an active social life at that time. ☺ Leia's huge lopped-down ears that gave her her name (because they looked like the doggie equivalent of Princess Leia's earmuffs) turned into equally enormous stand-up ears (with whimsical voices we used to ask her if she could get the BBC) and she ended up resembling a half-size German Shepherd, with the black saddle upon brown.

One Christmas Eve I had some errands to do, but Leia was acting particularly droopy. We were going to leave her alone the next day, and I took pity on her. It was a nice cool day, unlike at least one Christmas when I flew home to Rhode Island and it was 70°F when the plane took off, so I had no qualms spreading a towel over the back seat and having her lie there as I drove around doing my errands. She loved car rides. I remember dropping off some gifts at the Elder house and getting gasoline, with Leia happily lying on the seat of "Shadow," my Dodge Omni, lolling her tongue and occasionally sitting up when I came to a stop so she could peer out the window.

I had one final errand somewhere, and I'm not sure where, but I was going there by way of Windy Hill Road. As you near Cobb Parkway, there's a spot where a QuikTrip gas station stands now, but back then it was an empty field that fronted the Sleepy Hollow Kennel, a boarding and training facility. Traffic was backed up at the traffic light and I had the leisure to note with interest that on this grassy landscape someone had erected a living Nativity. There was a wooden stable set up, and, although the people playing the Biblical characters were not yet there, the livestock was already situated. A donkey was tethered near the stable, near a sign advertising the Living Nativity later that evening, and in front of it were several sheep, cropping at hay bales that had been left out for them.

I heard Leia's claws scrabble on the door and since traffic was stopped dead I could look back at her, and when I did, I burst out laughing. There she was, staring at those sheep with an intensity that nearly burned through the glass. Her mouth was parted a little, but she wasn't doggy "smiling," it was almost if she looked astonished. This was the dog who as a half-grown youngling already brought up with a litter of kittens went to "Auntie Anne" to narc on Buttercup for moving her latest litter. And who, as she got older, tried to herd the kittens. And now she was giving the sheep the one over with a sort of half-dawning recognition in her eye. You could almost see thought balloons coming from her, as if she were a character from "the funnies.": "I know what those are! They're...they're...I know what those are! I'm supposed to do something with them, but I can't remember what. But I do know what those are..."

Then the light changed and the car moved and she went back to being laid-back Leia again, but I still remember that Christmas Eve when all her little buried sheepdog instincts came through.

The House Without a Christmas Tree

Remember these? They were all the rage in the 1970s. People bought them ready-made, or, even more popular, bought a whiteware version which they then glazed at a "ceramics" class, and everyone's tree was fired in a big communal kiln. Then you would add the plastic colored "lights" and the star, and the entire tree would glow from an ordinary light bulb set within the tree. Some families added them to their other Christmas decorations, set on a china cabinet or breaking up a row of volumes on a bookshelf or used as a nightlight in a hallway.

For others...

The house next door to us was a big two-story home that had been built in the 1920s, and the land surrounding it, including our lot and the house on the corner as well as the land across the street, belonged to my godmother's family, the Danellas. My godmother grew up in the house and was part of the first class to graduate from Hugh B. Bain Junior High School in the last years of the 20s, and later she lived there with her mother and her husband, with her brother, sister-in-law, and niece living upstairs.

When her family sold that land and our house was built there, Mom and Dad must have found the two families next door good neighbors as well. My mother's mother quickly made friends with my godmother's mother, although both women struggled to understand one another as they were from different regions of Italy and the dialects were often quite disparate. In the empty lot next door that still belonged to the Danella family, an enormous vegetable garden grew each year, and there were pear and plum trees along the driveway, and a grape arbor in the small back yard. My godfather, Angelo Montella, was our fuel oil dealer, a genial, moon-faced man who was a soft touch for animals like my mother. If it were up to the two of them, they would have taken in every stray cat in the neighborhood. My godmother, Lillian Danella Montella, was a matter-of-fact, sensible woman. She kept an immaculate house despite the fact that she worked, went to the hairdresser once a week, and nursed her mother through her last years. Mother came to trust "Padina Lillian" ("Padina" being what you called your godmother if you're Italian) and when I was born she and Padine Angelo became my godmother.

I remember trotting across our driveway to her house on errands, to visit on holidays and on her birthday, which was August, and when I was tiny her mother "Zia Maria" and Victoria's mother "Zia Maria Antonia" (Victoria and her mother lived on the opposite side of the chain link fence from the old Speedway which separated our properties) would babysit me if Mother had to do an errand. In the summer she would come home to find me enthroned in one of the Adirondak chairs under the grape arbor, eating cantaloupe and grapes, and plums and pears from the trees.

My godparents never had children, and I was never nosy enough to inquire if they regretted it or not. It wasn't my place. But I always worried about them at Christmas, for they never had a Christmas tree. My godmother explained gently that they didn't really need a tree, they had no children. Trees were for families.

This didn't mean their house didn't have a festive air at all during the holidays. In our neighborhood front doors were only for company; in fact in winter, many people, like us, blocked up our door for the winter, which is why you would drive about New England in those days in February and still see Christmas bells, wreaths, spray snow, and other decorations on front doors. So you entered Padina's house through the side door, a big, stolid wooden door painted green, the entrance to the cellar on the very left, and up a short flight of steps to the back door (next to this door were the stairs to go upstairs to the apartment where Jimmy, Dotty, and Cindy lived). There would be something Christmasy on the door, a little wreath, perhaps, or a couple of Christmas cards. The door opened directly to the kitchen, which was, when I originally knew it, very old fashioned, with beadboard all around and a vintage gas stove against the left wall with a chimney pipe which went into the wall. For many years Zia Maria's rocker was right under the back window.

In the middle of the room was the kitchen table and there might be a Christmasy tablecloth or a little centerpiece, perhaps some curtains that were less summery than before. To either side of the door was a bedroom, and at the very corner of the kitchen was the glass-paned door with the glass doorknob that led into the formal dining room with the parlor and Padina's piano beyond. (The parlor was almost never used except at night when Padina might play her piano; in summer when the windows were open the classical pieces she played floated out the windows like heavenly birdsong.) I never knew them to keep a television in the parlor; after Zia Maria died, they made one of the bedrooms into a den and had the TV there, formerly it was always in the kitchen and so were they.

I loved that glass door. Just seeing Padina's neat-as-pin dining room, something we had no room for, and the shadowy parlor with the beautiful spinet beyond and all the lovely old woodwork was like looking into a magic world. At Christmas my godparents tacked up all their Christmas cards around that glass door and made it more magical still. But I was still always sorry that they had no beautiful Christmas tree to look at.

One Christmas season, and I have forgotten what year it was, or how old I was, Padina beckoned me in the house. The cards were already bedecking the glass door as she opened it and ushered me into the dining room, where it was cool and dim. Then she clicked a switch and the top of the buffet glowed with color. "There," she said matter-of-factly, but with slight amusement somewhere in the background, "do you feel better?" Set between the candlesticks was a ceramic tree that she had bought, or perhaps had been given, I don't recall longer. The details have blurred—did it have snow on the tips of its branches? or was the star large or small? the bulbs differently shaped?—but I remember the happy spectrum of color and the comfort of knowing they finally had a tree. It wasn't a big tree, nor one with shiny ornaments, or traditional tinsel icicles. But it was a Christmas tree, and in some way it was enough.