I got a handwritten letter from my friend Eric last year. I wanted to write him back, but the penmanship classes I had at Sacred Heart were all many years ago, and I never did have a very good hand.
Around the third grade I started taking typing during summer school. My mom was a legal secretary at the time and she knocked out a blazing 80+ words per minute. It was her idea that we all learn to touch type before we were 10. She was right. It was a good idea.
Our typing classroom was a room full of Royals, Burroughs, and all the other usual giant typing machines. Any one of them could have served as an anchor to a reasonably large boat. We got a great workout doing our typing drills. These machines were beasts.
Just after my letter from Eric came, I set out to find an old portable. I liked the idea of being a bit more thoughtful and taking time with a letter...and must say it was all kinds of fun to open the mail box and find a personal letter. It'd been a long time.
So I got this wonderful machine at a yard sale for five bucks. Nice. Robin cleaned it up and got me a new ribbon for Christmas. During her research locating the ribbon etc. she found the same machine for sale on the internet for many hundreds of dollars. Evidently it's rare and there are collectors. I have a collection of one.
While it's in pretty good shape, it can't make the letter G or the number 6.
My street address is 9767 so I thought that'd present a problem with return addressing an envelope, but I've got a PO Box 1104...OK problem solved there.
But the letter G is something else. Count your Gs...consider your gerunds! They are everywhere; and not. Being raised on my grandmother's knee so to speak, and she being a native of Alabama, she disdained the use of the final G almost completely. There was a lot of doin', goin', and workin' with Grandmere.
So along with a lot of clickin' and clackin' as I churn out the post, you might hear a Coosa County drawl echoed in my typewritten lines.
Back to my typin'...
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