I started writing on a manual typewriter.
Well, actually, I started by hand, on paper. But my mom had an electric typewriter, and when I was around eight years old, I taught myself how to hunt and peck on it. (I hunt and peck very well--someone once said it was like listening to a machine when I was really rolling--and I like it because my wrists stay in line. I don't have to angle them in order to use all my fingers on the keyboard, which means I've never had carpal tunnel. With the hours I've spent at the keyboard in my life, that is a major blessing.)
Anyhow, after I taught myself to use my mom's electric, she and I had to share. As I started spending more and more time writing, this became a problem. For, I think, my twelfth birthday, I got my own machine--an Adler manual typewriter. (And I sat on a little 1950s wooden clerical chair, too. It was as if the universe wanted to test my dedication.)
I loved the thing. I definitely had to get used to it--you had to hit the keys *hard*. To this day, I still do--I've destroyed a couple of candy-ass computer keyboards by stabbing the crap out of them. But nothing I do now approaches the force I had to use then. My right finger bent. My fingernails splintered and started growing in in visible layers.
Besides the work of it, the power it demanded from you, the fact that you had to MEAN EVERY WORD, I loved the cloth ribbons that went with my Adler. I can still smell them. New, they were so black it was like a cut of night. The letters they put on the page were a shock. Then you'd stop noticing--the clarity just a little less. In a few weeks the letters would grow--not so much fainter--but *thinner*. That was the key. On the ribbon you could see a trail of wear just *below* the middle.
That was the neat thing: when the letters got too thin, you could take the ribbon out, *turn it over*, and start creating a new track just above the old one. The letters wouldn't be good as new, but they'd be strong enough, and your ribbon would last for a long time.
I don't know when I inherited my mom's old electric. Some time later in high school. I brought it to college with me, where I used it in open defiance of the campus computing system. I probably never would have started using computers at all, except I met this guy. And that always changes the story.
