22 Pounds of Memory

The weight was almost unmanageable. 

When I was young my mother owned a manual typewriter, all metal and heft. It came in a box like a suitcase with a latch and plastic handle, and I was certain it weighed more than I did. 

The machine itself was cream and gray with seafoam-green accents straight out of the 1960s. It smelled of ink and machine oil. Trapezoid keytops bore letters in a san-serif font on heavy plastic, and there was no number 1 - my mom explained the lowercase L doubled for the number. The keybasket where all the typebars come together was embossed with the silver words "De Luxe" atop a wash of seafoam. 

The keys didn't yield like computer keyboards nowadays - back then if I wanted to communicate I had to put effort behind it, jam my point home with just my index fingers. On that machine my mom taught me my first typed sentence, about the goings-on of a quick red fox and a lazy brown dog. 

I didn't have much else to write about in elementary school. I banged out a letter or two to a neighborhood friend we left behind in the move from Pennsylvania to Texas, some nonsense sentences, some silly poems. 

What fascinated me was the mechanics and mystery of how these long, angled typebars could stamp my thoughts onto paper one letter at a time. If I messed it all up, there was a backspace key inexplicably pointing the forward direction. I could fix the error with some correction paper or a special eraser pencil. And just when I thought I was out of space - ding! - a reminder that a fresh, blank line was just around the corner. Push the carriage bar to the right, and start over.

I can't remember the story of how my mother acquired the typewriter - whether it was intended for high school or college, a budgeted purchase or a gift, new or used. I do remember that once upon a time my mom was a writer in her own right; she kept notebooks of long-abandoned handwritten stories and, while my dad flew jets, she authored an Air Force Officers Wives Club newsletter in the early '70s - perhaps on this very machine she would later carry into our family home and forget beneath a desk. 

Like so much else of my childhood, the typewriter was lost in a home foreclosure when I was 12. 

I didn't think about it for years. 

As my own writing endeavors grew in adulthood, the typewriter became a symbol that connected my mother, words, and me. More than a tool of communication, it was a mirror through which the best of us both passed. 

Occasionally I tried to find a vintage machine that matched what she had owned and used, but my memories of the thing were a mere haze of seafoam green and weight. Without knowing the brand or year it was made, my searches were brief and fruitless. 

My last effort was in February 2023. I paged through wrong images of green typewriters while choking on grief at the sixteenth anniversary of her death. But all I gained was the sad realization that even if my mom were alive today, our relationship still wouldn't be a thing of softness and comfort. Too many hard edges and dead-end roads.  

Eight months later, on a Friday night in October, I was half-heartedly scrolling through social media when a writer I follow posted that her dad had given her his college typewriter. She included a photo. 

I recognized it immediately - the hard cream exterior, the seafoam shift keys on either side, the key symbols for 1/2 and 1/4 that were so alien when I was too little for fractions. 

This was my mother's typewriter.

Staring at the photo on my phone, my chest tightened. I felt awestruck. I wanted to reach out and reverently touch it like I would have touched my mother's hand, like I did touch her face at the funeral home.  

Clear as a smile I could see the brand emblazoned on the front of the typewriter - Olympia. 

A too-good-to-be-true coincidence, and yet here it was. My clue to finding what my mother lost.

The wait was almost unbearable. 

Thanks to the miracle of search engines, after 30 years I knew within minutes that my mother's machine was an Olympia SM9 Deluxe. Known as the workhorse of the manual typewriter world, this particular model and color scheme was produced only between 1964 and 1969 and would probably work forever, with a little regular maintenance. 

Once again, I found that the internet is full of people looking to get rid of the things I've lost. 

With a few clicks on on eBay I uncovered a listing for an identical typewriter. It was in working order, shipping available from New York state. 

But it seemed like a frivolous purchase. Antique typewriters don't come cheap, and what would I do with this hulk of metal and plastic if I got it? It serves no practical purpose beyond paperweight and longing. 

My thumb hovered over the blue "buy now" button as I second-guessed my melancholy and considered that grief paints the past more beautiful than it was. It was a pause heavy with sick-sweet hope and reservation turned sour by a kind of love that would never be.

A few minutes later, I purchased my memory anyway. 

After a week that felt like a year, the typewriter landed on my porch in a busted-up cardboard box sealed by layers of black duct tape. I hauled it into the house and left it near a corner, too nervous to open it. 

What if it was all wrong, and not like my mom's at all? What if it wasn't the right brand or model, or didn't smell like ink and dust? 

What if the seller had duped me, and it was as broken and unusable as my childhood? 

What if it was exactly right, and seeing it again made me interminably sad?

What if this entire venture was a ridiculous attempt to go home again, which Thomas Wolfe and I know you can never do? 

Seeing the gray and cream box inside my home was surreal. It was something so familiar to me, yet so profoundly out of place in this house, in this state, in this year of my life. Each glance was startling, like seeing a person in the flesh when you know they're dead and buried.

I waited to open it until my husband and children surrounded me, both for support and to connect past to future. In order to get the weighty typewriter out, we had to destroy the cardboard box it came in. Isn't that the way life goes? 

The weight is immeasurable.

As I opened the carrying case, the typewriter looked just as I remembered. The slate of keys, the chrome carriage return bar, the knob to turn and feed a piece of paper. The seller had tested it, and his used page was still wrapped around the platen. Rolling down a few lines, I typed the first sentence my mother taught me on her machine: The quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog. 

A circle completed itself. 

Between the tears in my eyes and being out of practice with the strength needed to strike the keys, I made some mistakes. Had my mother been there, she would have been proud of me anyway. 

Both kids were fascinated by this manual dinosaur without a plug for a tail. They took turns sitting in my lap on the kitchen floor, hunting-and-pecking out their names. They were delighted by the ding! and confused when the margin setting wouldn't let them type any farther. Their devices are so complicated by comparison, it has become difficult for them to think simply.  

I rolled in a fresh page and wistfully asked my daughter, "Wouldn't it be something if my mom and I could type notes to each other through this?" 

The spacebar took me to the middle of the page, and I typed "I miss you." Then I sat in transcendent stillness, waiting for the keys to move on their own, just in case ghosts can respond. 

When I accepted it wasn't going to happen, that this was impossible despite my mom's tenaciousness, I let my little girl have a turn again. 

"I miss you too," she wrote as though my mother were whispering in her ear. "You're the best dater I could have." 

Daughter is a hard word to spell when it weighs so much. 

Now that it is with me, I understand this typewriter is more than a 60-year-old almost-heirloom that weighs 22 pounds. 

It's a tangible connection to my mother and who she once wanted to be, and a precursor to the writer I would become. 

It's clawing back another small piece of my childhood that was lost, and owning a happy memory of a time when there was precious little happiness.

It's an opportunity for my children to touch a rare piece of my past in a world that no longer holds on to things.

And it's a chance for us to write letters to someone they'll only meet through me.