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

Closing Time

by Susan Cameron

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
-- from "Closing Time" by Semisonic


Please excuse me for not leading off with a quote from Plutarch or Nietzsche; I have a head full of pop music lyrics, and the one above is a favorite.

That line has a particular resonance for me lately because of the accelerating pace of endings in my life and the lives of my friends. Three of us have had mothers die this past year, which is sad; but all three were difficult people who made life difficult for those around them, and their dying was not only inevitable, but in many ways a relief.

I did feel a pang in my chest when I opened my stationery box, saw that I was out of note cards, and realized it didn't matter -- I only mailed them to my mother, and she wasn't there any more. The twinge passed quickly, because I knew death was the friend who took my mother by the hand and left her Alzheimer's behind. I like to imagine death escorting her to a lounge in the afterlife filled with kindred spirits, all pretty and thirtyish again, drinking highballs, smoking Salems, laughing with each other and flirting with the piano player.

There's no soft way to point out that her death did not alter the fabric of my life, as cold as that sounds. There were two thousand miles insulating me from the day-to-day grind of dealing with her and caring for her. But, since I did apparently inherit some sort of caretaker gene, I spent an increasing and inordinate amount of time watching over and caring for a dear old friend who slid into dementia over the past year or two. It was time to call his adult children, and they turned him over to health care professionals. There are pangs at the finality of closing files and tidying up the last loose ends, but the sadness I feel at my buddy's predicament doesn't change the fact that I've got big swaths of my own time back.

And there it is: new beginnings coming from endings. My cat died months ago; now I've got my buddy's wonderful dog. I sold my business; now we have time to go traveling in our truck and camper. Tomorrow's my last day teaching Longevity Stick exercises; next week I'll start sending my elderly students postcards from the road, and they'll enjoy that too. Something is finished, and there is end-of-an-era wistfulness; but another thing begins, filling the space that had to empty out to make room for it.

Carly Simon had a huge hit, "Anticipation," as I was graduating from high school. The truth of the chorus, "These are the good old days," made me catch my breath as I stood in the doorway between one phase of life and another. But I think I'll give Green Day the last word:


Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road
Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go
So make the best of this test, and don't ask why
It's not a question, but a lesson learned in time

It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right.
I hope you had the time of your life.
-- from "Good Riddance" (Time of your Life), by Green Day

Copyright 2011, Susan Cameron

Attrition

by Susan Cameron

Sharon stared out her front window at the house across the street. Its bushes were pruned, its grass was perfect, its fresh coat of paint gleamed softly in the sun, and it had a dignified For Sale sign posted on the lawn. The short iron fence surrounding the front courtyard entry was decked out in clean white paint, as were the bars across all the windows. Those bars gave its ownership away -- it was a single woman’s house. But the woman who owned it was no longer single, and her new man didn’t want to live there.

Above and behind the new roof rose the huge arc of the old satellite dish, installed in the back yard when TV satellite dishes were the latest technology. She smiled as she remembered how proud Ron had been of that NASA-sized dish, how much he’d loved his TV. Genial Ron, laughing with her ex, Jim, about nothing in particular, raising the Corona beer bottle to his lips, blurry blue Playboy bunny tattoo on his forearm, chunky gold bracelet sliding on his wrist, sipping his beer, always laughing. Years later, she and Jim had boarded the boat that took Ron’s ashes into Newport Bay. His widow Cynthia had hysterics in the arms of her bewildered family. Mascara ran off her false eyelashes as she clung to the container holding Ron’s ashes, screaming “No, I can’t let you go!” as the boat heaved at anchor and the green-faced mourners tried not to do the same. So many years Ron had been gone. Jim, too.

Now Cynthia was going. Ron’s life insurance had been substantial, and Cynthia had her own pension and social security money as well. It had been more than enough to pay for plastic surgery and antidepressants, more than enough to attract inappropriate men who weren’t the least bit fazed by her panic attacks and neediness. Sharon stared at the empty house and silently wished her ex-neighbor well in her new life.

God, what was this mood she was in?

The past kept interjecting itself into her present lately. She’d be walking down the street with her husband Aaron and say things like, “There was a weeping willow tree in the center of that lawn when I moved here, back when it belonged to David and Diana.” Or, “That house was originally Paul and Evelyn’s. I used to play Bunco with Evelyn and her friends.” Or, “My friends used to call this street Van Land. Everybody on the block owned a van when Jim and I moved in – eighteen vans in eighteen driveways.”

Robert and Sarah, Mike and Mary, old Bill on the corner, Patrick and Janey, Chuck and Melanie, the children who’d played Marco Polo in her swimming pool, grown up with kids of their own by now – all gone. Sharon didn’t understand why all the old names and faces were suddenly coming back to her. Some of these people had been her good friends for a while, and some just friendly acquaintances, but they’d all vanished over the years – moved away, divorced and gone, dead and gone. All of this was perfectly normal, of course. She’d felt worse about the removal of the beautiful old overgrown liquidambar trees that had once lined her street than she did about the inevitable attrition of her neighbors. So what was this mood, this ache, this inexplicable nostalgia, if it was even nostalgia at all?

One restless night, while Aaron slept, she quietly stepped into the front yard to look at Venus shining near the crescent moon. Her old Toyota was parked in the driveway, and she sat on the trunk and tilted her head back to drink in the beauty of the sky. When she looked down from the moon and stars at Cynthia’s empty house, it finally struck her.

Cynthia was the last original owner in the neighborhood – except Sharon herself.

She looked back up at Venus and the moon and nodded once, as if they had spoken to her. She stood up, yawned, raised her arms toward the sky and stood on her toes, stretching every muscle in her body. She winced as she took inventory: a twinge in her right hand where she’d long ago cut herself in a kitchen accident, a zing in the left thumb where arthritis had set in; a ligament twanged near her left knee, trashed in a high-impact aerobics class thirty-five years before.

Sharon sighed, looked at Cynthia’s house and turned away. Her knee clicked all the way back to her front door.

copyright 2010, Susan Cameron