
It’s Canada Day; a pretty warm one, and I am in my back yard with my Smith-Corona Classic 12, a gift from Mimi for my birthday a few years ago. This is a manual typewriter which you could call portable, in the sense that it comes in a carrying case, but it must weigh ten kilos, so it’s not a typewriter that you’d want to bring anywhere. I laugh to think about it, but a years ago—the year I turned 30, to be precise—I travelled with my mom to Indonesia. By this point I owned a laptop, my first, which was a Toshiba. But this was before the Internet, and I still tended to write mainly on paper, that is, using a typewriter. My mom flew from Montreal to LA and I flew from New York, where I lived, to LA, where we met and rented a compact car to drive down to La Jolla, to vist her elder sister, my aunt Elsa, en route to crossing the Pacific Ocean.
I decided, for reasons that now feel a bit obscure, that I needed a manual typewriter to bring with me to Indonesia, so that I could write while I was there. In a free newspaper in San Diego, in the classified ads, I found a used manual typewriter for sale. I drove over in the little blue hatchback car to buy it off a Ukrainian woman, as I recall. In my memory it was not a particularly light typewriter; nonetheless I lugged it onto the plane and then all over Bali and Java. I was glad to have it, and I did do quite a bit of typing while I was there, while sitting in the shade with a cold drink. Who did I think I was, W. Somerset Maugham? I must have later lugged it back to New York, but I certainly don’t have it now. I have no idea what happened to the thing.
Continue reading