The Hammers and the Ribbon
It’s strange how much of your life hides in plain sight. The typewriter has been sitting on the shelf in our living room for years now, on display beside photos and ornaments, books and more books. There’s a sincerity to its presence, the dusty anchor of the reading and writing lives that are somewhere near the heart of our home, and the quiet beacon linking generations – the machine originally belonged to my father in-law, who brought it with him when he immigrated to Canada from Germany with his parents in the 1960s. My wife’s grandfather worked for the Olympia typewriter company, and what they carried with them was an Olympia Splendid 33 model, beige with crimson keys, complete with a sturdy case of black leather.
I suppose it sounds pretentious, but I’ve always taken pride in having the typewriter just sitting there. I don’t always pay much attention to it, but when I do, I admire its simplicity, the way it gestures to a period in time that I never fully participated in but still feel some connection to. Sometimes I even appreciate the way it silently shames us from its perch as we scroll through TV channels and curl our bodies around our phones, nobody saying much, the taint of wifi baked deep in our skin. It doesn’t have to be this way.
I’m old enough that typewriters were around in my childhood, but they already felt somewhat quaint, relics to be played with rather…
