My father calls to ask me if I know of a typewriter repair shop.  He’s got a couple letters he feels he must write, responses to old friends who’ve reached out to him sensing "the lateness of the hour."  Even as he asks I can see in his eyes he has little hope of hearing what he wants.  He knows which way the wind blows.  But because there is a certain fearlessness in him he asks anyway.

 

“I'm sorry, I don’t know of anyone who can fix your typewriter.”

 

Explaining, I say that word processing with computers has been by so many degrees better, so exponentially more facile and fantastic that it is changing the very way language is written.

 

I press on, saying I believe this technological change of our time is of equal social impact to Gutenberg’s printing of the Protestant bible which, as he and I’ve discussed innumerable times, caused literacy and the knowledge carried by it to spread viral into the ranks of the many so that the priests could no longer hoard it resulting in The Enlightenment, tada!  And that this, with computers, is as big a change as that.  And typewriters, well, they just got swept away.

 

He tilts his head.  He loves me and wants to believe I know what I’m talking about.  But for him, nothing’s altered.

 

Now don’t mistake me.  I’m all for technology. But still some sadness takes root knowing this fine human across the table, my father, whose being was formed by his relationship to the writing tool and symbol of his day, the typewriter, is, like it, being swept away.  Along with newspapers and bookstores.  Fond places. I feel great loss.

 

But this is not the same as saying I think we can keep them beside us.  Because they will go whether we cling to them or not.  So, I let the sadness run its course, let it remind me to breathe in this last bit of time with the consummately literate man across the table and say, “Let me type up those letters for you.  It would make me happy.”