This Thing, I Will Not Purge

It's my dad's old typewriter. Approximate vintage: 1935.

When I was in college, and my older brothers had already moved away, my dad would type a weekly letter to us. (My sister lived in our hometown and didn't get letters from home. She was sometimes envious of that even though she lived 3 miles from our parents.)

Dad used 2 pieces of carbon paper to type three copies of his letter. When he wrote a two-page letter, 2 of the 3 recipients would get one original page and one copy. The unlucky third person got only copies. The copies were not terribly easy to read, because my dad would refuse to take a new piece of carbon paper out of the box until he had depleted every last speck of "ink" on the one he'd been using and even with the pounding of the ancient typewriter keys, the carbon paper could only cough up so much blue. You have never seen anything so pulverized as the carbon paper he finally threw away. Mostly it was just vapor that he blew like a kiss over to the wastebasket.

The man knew how to get the "good" out of something. Still does. If all of us in the family took a piece of Doublemint gum, all of us but Dad would abandon it within an hour, two at the most. Dad would be chewing his at the end of the day, claiming there was still "good" in it. Nothing was to be wasted. This is a common trait among Depression-era people, but even more so from him. Which is how he managed to keep us all fed and clothed and educated and driving cars on the income of a dirt farmer.

At some point he started to write his letters with a pen. And they were individual letters, with pertinent newspaper clippings or photos added in. These were wildly comforting to receive, no matter how small the news inside. I saved every one of his letters for years, his and my mother's (which were almost as regular), the typed and the longhand, then finally burned about half of them. I now have only two suitcases full of their letters. It's one of those odd things you can look at and see the accumulation of love in an actual pile. I don't care if this makes me a packrat. I have been called worse.

Anyway, the typewriter stays, and it resides on top of my computer desk. I've given it a young pup of a halogen lamp as a friend. The lamp listens to all the old stories, and falls asleep at night resting its head on the keys.