Letter Perfect

Back in the fifties, when I was in high school, I got a typewriter, a pink Olivetti. It was portable in the sense that anything is portable if you're strong enough to pick it up, but this one had a handy-dandy zip case so you’d know it really was supposed to be carried around. The pink machine clicked and clacked and made all the other appropriate typewriter sounds.

If you made a mistake, you could cover the error with something like white paint that came in a nail polish-size bottle, complete with the same tiny brush. You can imagine what the effect of that “correction” looked like.

Or you could retype the entire page, praying that this new version would be error-free.

At a certain point electric typewriters came in, but by that time my Olivetti and I were inseparable, and so I took a pass. It served me well through writing jobs and writing letters.

But it was increasingly difficult to get a new ribbon, and whenever I was able get one, it came pre-dried out. That turned out not to matter with the advent of computers. Typos? No problem. New pages could be printed without any help from an outside source such as myself.

I still have my Olivetti, and I even know where it is — resting comfortably on a closet shelf. Unlike my computer, it doesn't have any memory, but that's okay. I have memories enough for both of us.

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