The Typewriter -- hunt and peck

The typewriter sat on a wooden desk near the classroom window, a heavy black machine with round keys that looked like little eyes staring up at the boy. It was September, and the afternoon sun came through the blinds in long yellow stripes. The teacher had told them to place their fingers on the home row, A-S-D-F, J-K-L and semicolon, and not to look down. This seemed an unreasonable request. How was a person supposed to find something without looking for it? The boy had spent most of his life being told to watch what he was doing. Now, apparently, the rules had changed. He pressed the A key. A metal arm leaped forward and struck the paper with a sharp clack. He pressed another, then another, and soon the room filled with the sound of thirty machines hammering away like a small factory making something nobody had yet invented. The teacher walked between the desks, correcting fingers and reminding them to sit straight. The boy watched the letters appear on the paper, one after another, each leaving its little black footprint. He liked that. A pencil could be erased, and chalk could be wiped away, but the typewriter seemed to mean what it said. Even its mistakes stayed with you unless you went to the trouble of correcting them.

By October, his fingers had begun to remember things his eyes no longer needed to see. He learned the peculiar music of the machine, the quick chatter of the keys, the metallic bell warning that the end of the line was near, and the satisfying sweep of the carriage return. He learned that some letters came easily and others had to be hunted like rabbits in tall grass. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog so many times that he began to feel sorry for the fox. There were timed exercises, little races against the clock, and sheets of paper filled with sentences that meant nothing at all. But one afternoon, when the teacher allowed them to type anything they wished, the boy sat quietly for a long time. Then he began. He wrote about a summer morning, his father's old fishing pole, and a creek that ran behind his grandfather's house. He wrote about the smell of wet earth and the sound of cicadas and how the world seemed larger when you were small. He made mistakes. He struck the wrong keys. He crossed out words and started sentences again. But something remarkable happened. For the first time, the machine was no longer telling him what to do. He was telling it something. When the bell rang, he pulled the paper from the roller and read what he had written. It wasn't particularly good, and he knew it. Still, it was his. He folded the page carefully and placed it inside his schoolbook, where it remained for years.

A lifetime later, the boy was an old man sitting before a computer that made almost no sound at all. The keys were soft, the words appeared on a glowing screen, and mistakes vanished with the touch of a finger. He could write a thousand words without changing a ribbon or rolling a single sheet of paper into a machine. Sometimes he missed the old typewriter, its weight and noise, the little bell that seemed to celebrate every completed line. He thought about that classroom and the teacher who had insisted he learn to type without looking at his hands. She had been teaching him more than she knew. She had taught him to trust his fingers, to be patient with mistakes, and to understand that words were worth the trouble of putting them down. He looked at the blank screen for a moment, then began to type. Somewhere in the quiet of the room, he could almost hear the old keys striking paper, and the faint ringing of a bell. He smiled. The machines had changed, and so had the world, but the wonderful thing remained. A person could sit alone in a room, put one word after another, and leave something of himself behind.