Remember that you could only make an exclamation point by typing an apostrophe (they were straight) and then backspacing to type a period beneath it?

My son asked, first time he tried the Royal, “Where’s the 1?”

You need to use lower-case L. I’d completely forgotten that until I answered him.

Tuesday morning, before we left for Theophany, I checked my email and found a Google Alert for my name on a site that links to mentions of Royal typewriters. Just down the page was a link to a recent interview with Virginia Aste, Richard Brautigan’s first wife. She tells about an Idaho camping trip she and Richard took. She says: “Richard was always writing. He sat at a card table with his Royal typewriter during the trip. I didn’t know what he was writing until later.”

His pages became Trout Fishing in America.

It tugged my memories. The gray, dignified look, the smell of ink ribbon, the sound made by a key’s strike. At once I was back in my bedroom during the summer after sixth grade, when Mom finally allowed us kids to practice writing and create whatever we wanted on her prized typewriter. (It had been her high school graduation present in 1951. May I look so poised when nearly 60.)

A book I read this past summer showed me I wasn’t the only writer influenced by a manual machine. Charles J. Shields writes, in Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (in which he refers to the famous author by her first name, Nelle, and talks about Nelle’s childhood friendship with Truman Capote):

Mr. Lee gave them the 1930s equivalent of a word processor: a rugged, steel-chassised, black Underwood No. 5 typewriter…Depressing a key lever raised the corresponding letter from the semicircular comb, shifted the carriage, and resulted in a satisfying “Clack!” as the letter struck an ink ribbon and imprinted its shape on a sheet of paper. Just operating it was fascinating. But that was not Nelle and Truman’s ambition. They wanted to use it to write stories.

Ah, the stories we typed in my day. The poems – Pebbles is my dog/She sleeps like a log – masterful. Best was the novel I was finishing – Parrot, the Jungle Girl – handwritten over the school year on lined paper, in pencil, of course. One hundred twelve pages when finally finished that summer. I worked hard on typing, double-spacing and correcting with our ink-erasing pencil that had a little brush on one end. I only made it through page 19. But it’s neat to retain these efforts, this first typeset story by me. (A quote from p. 17: “Morning had lit up the sky.”)