typewriters
once upon a time, I was a small boy, and my mother's room held a very mechanical device. I had no idea what it did, but it had fancy painting - scrollwork and a name - on it. it was black and had forty-leven shiny buttons on it, and, from my height, you could see that when you pushed down on one of those shiny buttons, thin pieces of metal under it moved down and forward. when my mother used it, she pushed the shiny buttons way farther down than I could, and when she did, something snapped and something else popped! wow! I could hardly wait til I could use the very mechanical device too. I had become impatient with "when you're older". it took forever to get from three to four (years old), and seemed to take longer to get from four to five. who the hell knew when "older" would happen? but the very mechanical device was an example I could understand. if I couldn't push the shiny buttons down far enough to get the snap and pop, then obviously I had to wait til I was older - and stronger. so I waited and strongered, and one day it happened. snap! pop! ooo! I told my mother I was now old enough to use the very mechanical device. grownups! no, it turned out that every finger had to be able to push down on the shiny button far enough to get a snap-pop. hmpf. well since my index finger could, then my middle finger could, and my thumb could, but my lazy fingers were two years younger than the rest of my fingers. I wanted to scream. it took a lot of hidden practice - hidden practice was easy because my mother was often busy with the baby or with my little sister - but finally one day I could get a snap-pop with my ring finger - a dumb name if ever there was one. I wouldn't have a ring until I was much, much, much older. and some men never wore a ring at all. why then, oh why, have a ring finger? it didn't matter. I could get a snap-pop with my ring finger on both hands! oh those damned little fingers. it did take forever before either one of them would get a snap-pop from the very mechanical device! but both finally did. I think I was a hundred and forty-two by then. so I could finally start learning to use the very mechanical device, right? of course not! grownups are way slicker than that! - oh wait. let me interrupt. remember I told you that it had a name on it? it did! it had my name on it. it said Underwood! did that mean every child had to work like I did to use a very mechanical device that had his or her last name on it? no, it meant a company named Underwood had made it. no, the company had nothing to do with any Underwoods we were related to. back in "the states", there were lots of Underwoods, and most of them had nothing to do with each other. I was flabbergasted! but still determined to use that damned device. before I could though, I had to color on a very special map. it showed the layout of the shiny buttons, which I must now call keys, even though they looked nothing at all like keys. we called them keys because that was their name. I sighed, "yes ma'am." I had run into that argument before. you couldn't win with grownups. so now I had to color the map of keys with eight colors, one for each of my fingers. what about my thumbs? they didn't matter, you didn't use your thumbs on the typewriter. what was a typewriter? it was what I called the very mechanical device. damn! it had a name! oh, and I had to color the keys lightly. no, not the real keys, the keys in the map. I had to color them lightly so I could still see the symbol on the key after I colored it. then I had to color a black circle around eight of the keys, and learn to call them the home keys, they were where my fingers would wait to jump to some other key when I needed to. then we had days and days - I used to claim months and months - of drills where my mother would say a word, and I would remember how to spell it, then push the right keys on the map in the right order with the right finger for each key. finally I passed some test and I was ready to learn how to use the typewriter. and you can see that it's going to take at least one more appreciation for me to get done with typewriters. but you can also see how determined I was that I was going to learn to use that very mechanical device. damn, I worked for that!
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