Progress Report

On other fronts: the "commercial" job I alluded to is still too germinal to talk about. My North County Perp two-pager has, unfortunately, been relegated to the back burner for a while, the inevitable fate of non-remunerative endeavors elbowed aside by income-producing projects. (The bills must be paid, y’know.) As you may have noticed, my mid-week blog posts were also a casualty of the week’s professional demands. I did, however, get the lawn mowed.

The animated typist I used to decorate Monday’s post, meanwhile, led my sharp-eyed pal Bruce Garrett to comment by email: "You did the typewriter’s carriage movement backwards deliberately didn’t you?"

Gulp.

Ther clunky black Underwood that occupied a place of honor in my childhood home in Alabama remains an important memory from those days. Both of my parents were part-time writers, you see, so the clatter of metal keys springing rhythmically into action was soothing background noise to me. It meant that my parents were absobed in the same kinds of happy creative reveries that I had begun to discover. Like the noise of freight trains passing fifty yards outside my bedroom window several times a night, the family Underwood’s clatter lost any harshness it might have otherwise have had because of its comforting regularity in my daily life. By the time I was seven I had begun typing out scripts for imaginary radio plays on the same machine I watched mom and dad using.

Of course, if you had looked over my shoulder in those days you might have noticed that my manipulation of the carriage was a little weird, just as my ways of grasping pens and eating utensils have always been. We left-handers constantly devise unconscious work-arounds that allow us to use devices that were created for use by the right-handed majority. Typewritter carriage levers were obviously positioned with the needs of right-handers in mind, as are the shapes of the loops at the ends of most scissor handles. Minor hurdles to utilitarian gracefulness, these are — but we lefties forge onward.

So if the cartoon fellow in my Monday animation moves oddly when viewed from behind, so probably did I before computer keyboards kicked typewriter keyboards overboard. My memories of all that have clearly faded, acclimated as I have become to a world where digital text "wraps" automatically on LCD displays that, unlike typewriter carriages, don’t move back and forth in front of you while you compose masterpieces for the ages.