It's the winter slump time with foggy cool mornings making it hard to get up out of bed, and harder to face the day. I can't even see out the window this morning, but this was the view yesterday.Passed along the Classic 12 to another one of my son's friends after my wife and I discussed the curse of Perfectionism that seems to settle in over boys of this age, dense and impenetrable like our morning fog. I suppose it's just another taste of the upcoming teenage years: suddenly we're dealing with peer pressure, and fretting about hair and clothes and shoes and the "right" way to carry backpacks to school (dragging them nonchalantly behind on the way to class, apparently.) Like my own son, the Classic's new owner struggles with writing assignments, grappling with the idea that he's allowed to write what he wants, and not to try to write what he thinks his teacher wants. It's a hard lesson, when the world is very black-and-white and wrapped in fog. I hope the Classic helps him out. Manual typewriters are perfectly non-judgemental, they don't beep or blip or underline when you've made a gaffe, they're just happy to serve you and wait on you, as long as you keep them well-fed with paper and ribbons. The perfect companion! The new owner was well-pleased with the Classic's paper "ears", its Power Spacer key, and the magic of the typebar unjammer. I don't know if it will help him out of the fog, but I hope it'll be a good companion as he works his way through it.
2 comments:
I really think there should be a national movement to get more typewriters into the hands of the under 16 crowd. It's the only damned way for these folks to just *write.* I think for the right kind of kid, its a revelation.
Based on the discussion in the Yahoo portable typewriter group, random acts of typer-charity seem to be widespread. I certainly think a typewriter can't make anyone's writing worse than it already is, short of bludgeoning the keyboard with their feet.
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