Admittedly, I'm still productive using the Dragon (speech recognition software that is perhaps more accurately described as speech approximation software) but sometimes I get sick of yammering on out loud and correcting ridiculous errors on the Dragon’s part. But there’s still something second-rate about dictating instead of typing. Typing feels more private, secretive, as if thoughts and words could be kept from parts of one's own brain, apparently. A microphone just doesn’t have the allure of the keyboard.

 

The keyboard has been my shield (if I write it down it can’t plague me); it is my segue into the world. It is my paint brush, my guitar. When I was a teenager I would watch television in a recliner with my hands clasped in front of me typing all the dialogue on the backs of my hands. Including all the punctuation and carriage returns. For hours at a time. Not the ads, but all the dialogue of all the shows.

 

I was motivated in part by my mother’s typing speed-- legendary in the family-- so it felt like family tradition when I hit 120 words per minute. I have slowed quite a bit and last year sat next to a woman who typed that fast, nonstop, for hours at a time, as I once had. Unnerving. The contrast between how I used to type and how I type now was so disheartening that I asked to move desks.

 

My first typewriter was a small white manual Corona and as if it was yesterday I can see opening my bedroom door and seeing the desk lamp shining on the white typewriter, the only light in the room. Beckoning. Between one of my years in college I went to Washington DC on an internship with the National Organization for Women (NOW).  At that time, I wanted to become a lawyer and advocate for women. I'm not sure what the other tasks were among the staff (this is a world before email that keeps us all at keyboards all the time) but I missed typing so much that I volunteered to type the NOW president’s speeches. I had to have a keyboard under my fingertips.

 

I only have a few objects that I consider heirlooms and two of them are typewriters. My mother had a behemoth of an IBM Selectric and the ball bouncing and twisting was one of the bright sounds of my childhood. I have it in the garage zipped in a plastic blanket bag. I also have my grandfather’s field typewriter, very small, that originally came in a black box with a self-contained stand – the legs folded out from a special compartment. It sits next to my mother’s, honored objects both.