In two weeks my oldest child is turning eleven. Just like every year, five weeks later, I’ll turn thirty years older than that.
For her birthday, this almost eleven-year-old has asked for a typewriter, which is how I find myself hunched over an Underhill Finger Flite Champion with greasy keys and a body that’s maybe threatening to rust. When technocrats would have her tethered to a machine, addicted to a screen, freely substituting her own thoughts—to say nothing of friends—for ones generated by artificial intelligence, the birthday request is a relief. Maybe too proud, I am comforted by it, touched to think of her hammering out letters pulled from her own brain, sending them one at a time through an inked-up ribbon onto a piece of paper, forming words and worlds she can hold in her hands.
I blow a can of compressed air leftover from the noisy refrigerator repair of a few months ago through the machine’s atomic-age curves. The can goes cold in my hand and spews brown specks across the table. There’s sticky rust-colored grime on each of the typewriter keys and I picture the typist who hovered over these keys when the machine was new, cigarette burning to a stub between fingers with manicured nails, shrouding plastic keys in nicotine while she typed her first novel or someone else’s—your guess. I swab at them with Q-tips and rubbing alcohol, and the cotton tips turn brown.