In my early college days, I spent a lot of my free time writing short stories and essays. Here’s one of the first ones I did, which still seems to hold up pretty well, especially as a quick weekend read.
My dad has this old typewriter that was made years before I was a twinkle in his eye. It’s a heavy, lumbering brick of a machine, a metal monstrosity that drags your arm down when you grab hold of the handle on its cover and take it anywhere. The thing is large and unwieldy; you have to pound the keys so hard that it makes your fingertips hurt after just a line. There’s an old ribbon of ink that’s probably older than me. I wonder if they even make those ribbons for it anymore.
When you try to type on it, you have to be careful. If you tap too soft, nothing comes out on the page. Too hard and you tear through the paper. None of the letters seem quite level with each other, and when the bell dings and it’s time for the next line, the spacing seems to vary. I look at this thing and think about the laptop on my desk and wonder how Dad ever made it through college without being able to correct his mistakes before he printed, much less without the Internet.
I remember when I hadn’t even thought of heading off from home, more concerned with a book report and trying to do stuff with my friends on the weekend, when he showed it to me. “I bought this before I started college. It was top of the line,” he said. “All the newspaper reporters used it. You haul it anywhere, and you just needed some paper to make it go.”
We didn’t have a computer back then, but we had a more recent model with two fonts and built-in white-out. It was the size of a small briefcase and roared with power. Thinking of this, I gave him this weird look and said, “We’ve got an electric one. Why would I bother to use this one?”
He looked at me with that look that dads give you when they’re about to impart some great advice or wisdom. “Sometimes, you can’t get to electricity.”
Dad went to college a long time ago. Or what seems like that to me. He told me stories of his youth, back when so much of what’s now the buildings and streets of civilization were still nature, just a wide open space ripe for exploring. He’d speak of adventures beyond the border of the country over long weekends with friends, before the world became close-knit. They would explore. Go on adventures. This was a time when there was still a world to explore, unknowns all around if one just knows where to look.
He spent summer days working at a ranch that’s now an upper-middle class shopping center. Long roads once surrounded by nature are now blocked up with houses so high that they spill onto the mountains. He’d always say to me, “I remember when there was nothing here, when you could find a perfect view of the sunset no matter which way you looked.” He remembers climbing around in ruins before the government made people stand and look at them from a distance.
When I was eleven, we went to one of these places. “Do you know why today is special?” he asked me. “They’re letting people walk around in the ruins again. Just like I did when I was a kid. You’ll probably never get a chance like this again.” I don’t remember much about that day, but I remember my sneakers smearing the dusty earth with an imprint, and wondering if it would still be there years from now. The aged walls of the building seemed to speak to Dad. It was like he was remembering what it was like when he walked through them years ago, taking the same steps that he had in his memories.
After a few months at the university, I thought that I had a good grasp of what college life was like. The underage drinking, the tight clothes of the sorority girls, the sleeping in and missing early classes, the pranks. I wondered why Dad never said anything about all of this. This was the fun stuff that made it interesting. The small details of partying and debauchery that I had never thought would exist. I wondered if there was a mental reset button that hits people when they leave college that makes them forget about how much fun it can be. How wild and crazy and free you can feel.
It wasn’t long before I started feeling that reset button coming on. Bouts with alcohol poisoning, bad hook-ups, worse grades, and security reports began to take their toll. I wondered if I was missing something from the experience. Everything around me was so urbanized. There was no place to explore. Capitalism and progress had pushed forward so much since my father’s day that there were no unknowns. The mystery of life seemed to disappear.
While home over the summer, I found the old typewriter again, holding onto its last ribbon, sturdy and faithful as ever. When no one was home, I took off the green shell that covered the keys and put in a piece of paper. I pressed the keys, at first too soft, then too hard. It took me a while to get it right, but once I realized how the letters fit together, how the small rods darted out and pressed ink to the page, it started to make sense. This typewriter wasn’t a tool for my father during college, it was college. Like it is for me.
There are common experiences that we all share in our youth, but over time, the lessons we learn from them are all that remain, not the stories behind them. The tales we tell are from our friends, from once-in-a-lifetime chances that pass by if you blink. They’re a chance to see a sunset, or leave a footprint in the dirt. There are still adventures among the unknown and mysterious, but sometimes they’re harder to see than just looking around an open space.
And sometimes they’re right in front of you.
When I was sitting in the Toronto airport (Pearson, for all you airport story completists out there) this past week on a five hour layover, I noticed something about people that I’d never really paid much attention to before: everyone waits differently.
Every month, I get hundreds upon hundreds of spam comments that are caught in my blog’s spam filter. Sometimes they’re philosophical, sometimes they’ve got a funny sense of irony…what will they have today
On the list of things that I don’t do very well, gardening and plant care is pretty high up there. I’m fine with animals (kept a goldfish I won at a carnival alive for over three years, plus my dog is in great health despite being the dog-years equivalent of Betty White’s older sister), but I just fail with plants.
