I have always loved typewriters. Before I could read, I was writing and typing. They were two separate pursuits. I wrote stories by drawing pictures, connecting characters to word balloons to indicate dialogue. I typed for the sheer joy of working machinery. I doubt I was aware of the fact that typing could produce words.
Early on we had an ancient black typewriter, immensely heavy, all metal, exciting and mysterious to me because of its many moving parts. To me it resembled a huge, cumbersome centipede, except all of its legs were inside. Or maybe those were teeth I could make gnash by pressing the keys, preferably as many keys as I could at once. I had license to destroy that typewriter as quickly as I liked, since it was loved by no one else in the house. And surely I did destroy it; the next typewriter I remember is the one pertinent to this story. I was using it when I was seven years old.
This typewriter had metal within it, but was not overwhelmingly metal. It was plastic, a gentle beige color with brown keys and white letters on the keys. I was fond of the way it had its name splayed out in bumps of letters across the front--COLUMBIA I think--the way the basement refrigerator said, curiously enough, HOTPOINT. I spent a lot of time with this typewriter striking two keys together so they'd get stuck on the verge of typing their letters, then striking more and more keys so their spindly centipede legs would become attached to the first, until I'd have a huge clump suspended just above the roller. Pretty soon the clump would be too large to sustain itself. As I struck it from one side with a letter, two or three letters would fall off the other side. I didn't use the typewriter solely for playing this game, but it was a wonderful way to alleviate writer's block.
Anyway, I started getting serious about typing up stories when I was around seven. The typing table was in my room anyhow because my sister often used it, and she and I shared the room. I cut sheets of college-ruled composition paper into quarters, typed my stories on them, and stapled them into books. One day as I sat there thinking of what to write, unable to cure my block even with my key clumping game, I set out to explore the drawers of the typewriter desk, which for some reason I had not yet investigate. The desk was actually a table with collapsible sides and a very shallow drawer, barely deep enough to lay a pencil in. I had to jerk it open. Seeing some pages of yellowing newsprint stuffed in there, I took them out and started to read a horrible story.
About 20 years earlier, it seemed, we had a president named John Fitzgerald Kennedy who got shot while riding in a parade in Texas. This story took up a lot more columns than I was used to seeing in newspapers; a lot more pages too. The Post-Dispatch described Kennedy getting taken to a hospital and what the reports out of the hospital were saying. The reports didn't sound very positive. Then, before I knew it, President Kennedy was dead. Another day's articles had news about the funeral. The story kept going on and on, but Kennedy was no longer alive. I couldn't believe it. What a terrible story. Everybody knew when you wrote a story, you had to have a happy ending. Was this all true? Why did it end like this?
I went downstairs and confronted Mom with it. I had gotten the newspapers out of her typing desk, after all. She was the one (although I didn't know this at the time) who had wanted to be a journalist, and she was probably the reason I liked to write. She could tell me whose sick joke this all was.
No, it wasn't a joke, she said. It was all true.
Something was wrong. I had to blame someone for whatever had gone so wrong. I accused Mom the only way I knew how: "Why didn't you tell me?"
"It happened long before you were born," she said, as if to say, this doesn't concern you. But it did, and it does, because time is no real distance.