Stealing Grandma’s Word Machine

Remington

Can a typewriter have a Southern accent?

My grandmother was a bit of a Southern belle, having grown up comfortably in Meridian, Mississippi before taking up with a Yankee from New York, and finally settling in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The details of that odyssey aren’t important here; what’s to the point is that I remember the soft roll of her voice, and the smile in that voice as well.

I could hear that voice in person through the years of our family’s many summer visits from Southern California to Colorado, and I could hear it in my imagination when I read the words of her letters, which she wrote to me and my siblings on birthdays, and to my parents, perhaps to impart some neighborhood gossip or suggest a new card game she’d learned in their absence. She did love her cards.

Grandma Bentley is probably dealing a sharp hand in heaven right now, and has been fleecing the angels there for many years, so the letters have long ceased. But the typewriter, the compact, circa 1930 Remington, lives on. And thanks to my oldest sister’s efforts to have it refurbished and shipped to me, it lives in my house. Let me assure you—this isn’t a Macbook Air.

The Underwood as Missile Launcher

Just a couple of years out of college, fancying myself a writer who needed tangible evidence, I bought a massive Underwood typewriter from a Goodwill, or maybe even a pawn shop. It was from the early 1940s, and if dropped from a 10-story building, would have continued through the ground for another story or two. It had a massive frame, with enough steel for a missile launcher. This Remington is much more compact, merely a bazooka.

If you haven’t typed on a manual typewriter for some time (or never), you may have forgotten what a tactile presence the machines have. When depressed, individual keys swing up rapidly and plunge down, a whipping arm with the fisted letter at the end. The Remington’s keys impact the paper with a sharp “thwack!”—if you had to clandestinely write something while someone else is in the house, better head to the basement and work under a mattress. It’s loud, and satisfyingly so.

But my fingers are no longer the Underwood power-plungers they once were. I haven’t been using the Remington enough, so I haven’t developed a good rhythm. I have to compel my digits to drill down, with power, through the full, long carry of the keys. My typing is more, “thwack, thwack, thwww, thwww, thwack!” Mistakes abound. And the Delete key on such a device was known as Wite-Out, a once ubiquitous substance that is probably used now to bleach discolorations in plaster or perhaps to staunch bloody noses. I wouldn’t invest in the company stock if I were you.

Missing the Scream Key

No self-respecting Internet troll would ever use the Remington—it doesn’t have an exclamation point! How could anyone acidly rant on about Gweneth Paltrow or climate change hoaxes or our Muslim Socialist Kenyan (and probably secretly vegan) president without this key key? I tried to cobble together an exclaimer out of lowercase i’s and l’s, with a period below, but to no avail. Surely a machine from a kinder, gentler time. The machine makes music too: there’s a lovely “ding!” when you reach the end of a line, which signals progress. (Though in my case, it mostly signaled that a line full of typing errors was ready to be supplanted by a fresh one.)

I doubt I’ll be using the Remington for much more than writing ransom notes, but I’m very pleased to have it. I’m not nostalgic for many old things, except perhaps for my grandmother. I can’t have her, but I have her word machine. I’m hoping there’s a story submerged in there, perhaps something of a Flannery O’Connor flavor, that I can pull up and out.

Thwack!