Typewriter

"What an unusual typeface," said my English teacher.  "I've never seen a student turn in an essay typed in script before."

"I used my grandpa's typewriter," I said.  "It's different."

"And the paper's different, too," she said.  "Why are the pages so short?"

"I used my grandpa's stationery, and decided I should cut off the letterhead before I turned in the essay."

"Why?"

"He sells gravesites for Forest Lawn Cemetery."

She burst out laughing, and I did too.  "Thank you for your consideration," she said, "and for making my day."

I remembered that conversation as I looked at the filthy, battered metal carrying case that still held my grandfather's typewriter after all these years.  I unlatched the case and smelled cigarette smoke.  His last Chesterfield had been stubbed out in 1978, probably minutes before the massive heart attack that took him out.  Somebody, one of my cousins, had screwed around with the machine after Grandpa was dead and jammed the keys.  My father had insisted that they mail him the typewriter, since he didn't have anything else tangible to remember his own father by.  Maybe they sabotaged it deliberately before they mailed it, or maybe they jacked it up as soon as they got their hands on it -- who knows?  But there it sat, yellowed with age, broken and useless.

I sighed and latched the lid back on the case, picked it up by the frayed leather handle and set it aside with the mountains of stuff I'd pulled out of closets and drawers.  Dad was dead, and we were all deployed around his house, emptying every nook and cranny and seeing what was what.  He had given us fair warning.  "Your stepmother and I moved into this house in 1988, and there are boxes in the garage that were never unpacked.  I have no idea what all is in there -- books for sure, but I don't know what else.  Good thing we paid the moving company so much money to pack and bring it all -- must have been really important stuff, huh?"  My stepsister and her husband will sort through what's left in the house that once belonged to her mom and my dad.  They will keep what's useful or nostalgic, and get rid of the rest.

Feeling motivated by cleaning out my dad's closets and drawers, I opened my filing cabinet, plugged in the shredder, and decided to make things easier on whoever has to eventually square my things away.  Surely I could shred supporting documents from ancient tax returns?  Into the shredder went old SBC and MCI phone bills -- those companies are long gone; Washington Mutual, Home Savings, Corus Bank, Countrywide statements -- they're gone, gone, gone, gone; C.A. Robinson in L.A. -- gone; Advanta and Providian and other purveyors of Visa and Master Cards -- gone, done and dusted.  I shook my head.  My filing cabinet was a crypt full of dead companies, haunted by flimsy paper ghosts of businesses past.

Maybe that's why I left the typewriter behind -- my grandfather's, then my father's -- without a twinge.  Everything has its time, and everything passes.  Someday, somebody will look at whatever computer I was using when I bit the dust, shake their heads, and let Goodwill or the Salvation Army have it.

However, I have more photographs I found while searching through my father's lifetime of things, and I will put them in albums with the rest of my old photos just for my own sake, despite knowing that when I'm gone, they'll go into rubbish bins.  So it goes, to quote Kurt Vonnegut -- and my crumbling paperback copies of his Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle, the ones I bought back in high school, the ones with my name and little peace signs on the inside covers, back when I was typing essays in fancy script on my grandfather's Forest Lawn stationery -- they'll end up in the same rubbish bins.  So it goes.  And so it must.

(Meanwhile, gather ye Thai food while ye may...)  ;)


Susan Cameron, copyright 2013