Sitting here, typing on this stupid MacBook Pro or, for a change of pace, that pink MacBook Air over there, or the new, fancy iMac desktop in my office back there, a weird thought came over me.
I recall a moment when I was an airline pilot relocating from one duty station to another. I had my belongings packed into the one suitcase I had and a second bag, my electric typewriter. During the flight, we hit some turbulence and the typewriter took what turned out to be its last flight. It left the confines of the cargo compartment, flew a bit, and hit the floor on a very bad angle.
One last flight, one final hard landing and that was it for my last typewriter.
But I want another.
It's been decades since I used one; in those years, home computers have come into existence, the price has dropped, and reliability has increased. We now have computers on our phones and wear them on our wrists. These marvels of human engineering do many things that other machines or the smartest people in the world used to do. They type, remind us of errors, even suggest alternatives.
I have owned many of them, some expensive, some cheap. Some survived a long time, others failed at the hands of a young son's first attempts at what would become a lucrative career in computer engineering and software development.
Not one of them loved me as much as that typewriter loved me. There was no personal attachment to the device itself, only to what it could do for me. Maybe it was faster or larger of smaller. It was nothing more than a means to some end; it had nothing to do with enjoying the journey itself.
Is using one efficient? Yes. Can a writer make a change quickly? Very much so. That sentence in the last paragraph was, "It was nothing more than a means to an end, having nothing to do with the journey itself." This paragraph has changed form several times, too. Not one of those changes can ever be seen, though. A typewriter creates a historical record of movement, including sucesses and failures.
I want another typewriter. Is that an age thing? Who knows?
Who cares?
