My husband calls. There’s a manual typewriter on the “free table” at work where residents in that old city apartment building leave the possessions they no longer want when they go. He asks if he should bring it home.
I think about the one in storage that took me so long to throw away. The last of a line of three or four treasured machines on whose reassuring metal keys I centered my identity.
“It’s an Olympia,” he says. Not a brand I ever had. Corona, Underwood, of course.
I say, “Don’t know what I’d do with it. It’d probably end up in one of my ritual areas dedicated to my dad.”
My earliest typewriter memory floats up. Nighttime, listening from my room to my father typing away at the kitchen table. This became, more often than not, the background sound to my childhood drift into sleep.
Late in dad's life we had to hunt around the city to even find the "self correcting" ribbon for his IBM Selectric. And then the machine broke and we could not find a man to fix it anymore.
He started writing long hand in notebooks my son bought him. But by then, the need for a device to record his thoughts had much lessened. We were his final audience.
“No, better just leave it,” I say to my husband. He knows why.