My First Typewriter
Assunta Maria Vickers, Inland Empire Branch
I Remember.
It was Christmas the year I turned 16. I had recovered fairly well from my crushed left ring finger in the row-boat crash of three and a half years earlier. When I opened my gift, I remember, all I could do was smile, from ear to ear.
I mean, it had taken its toll, the 57 stitches to put my future-wedding-band finger back together. The painful bi-weekly bandages. The complete lack of sensation once the wounds closed up. The doctors all said the finger-feeling would return as the nerves regenerated, at a turtle’s pace of 1/8th inch a year. Lots of physical therapy was in store for me.
It didn’t get me out of typing class in junior high, but the teacher was gentle with me, and encouraging. I “could do it!”, she said that a lot, and never held me to the speed test, just the accuracy. And she let me look to see where that numb finger was going on the keyboard, while the others in class were not allowed. I was amazed that I passed the class and was credited for that elective. Typing class wasn’t so bad, at all!
I was already writing stories as a teen in high school, processing life’s many challenges, but it was all script scribbles. I remember being grateful that it was my left hand that got hurt so bad, and not my dominant one, so at least I could function, albeit clumsily. I’d tried not to think about how I’d ever be a beautiful bride the future moment when Mr. Wonderful would place a ring on that finger. Some sensation did return to my left ring finger, very slowly, as the years went by. But it still didn’t work quite right.
My mom somehow knew, as Moms somehow do, what a meaningful therapeutic tool, and a prophetic gift would be, for me, just at that time. I would never have even asked—I had not ever thought about it, nor did I see it coming. We were basically poor so what I normally received for Christmas was a sweater, new pajamas, underwear, socks, and such.
But this wrapped package was …heavy? Total surprise! Perhaps she was paying more attention to me than I’d imagined. It was a beautiful blue and grey Smith-Corona manual typewriter, in its own case, with a lock and key! There was another wrapped package – typewriter paper – that followed, for me on that morning. Now I could really write! I wasn’t very verbal in those days, but yes, I can remember happy smiling!
At our IECWC general meeting in August, we spontaneously reminisced about our old typewriters, because one of our members has a collection of them, with one visible on her zoom screen! I smiled again with this memory. Ear to ear.
HONORING MY STORY, Assunta Maria Vickers
“My First Typewriter” originally appeared in the
August 2021 issue of Fresh Ink,
newsletter of the Inland Empire Branch