typewriter

I love antique stores. I mean, I really love antique stores. Really. Love.

I am fortunate enough to live in a town where there are several really great ones, and if I have an hour to myself you can bet I’m going to be in one of them. Sometimes I just can’t stand it if I haven’t been able to go for several weeks, and I drag the kids with me. Those usually end up being very quick trips. Sometimes that’s enough.

I’ve always been drawn to old stuff. I feel at home wandering amongst the booths and shelves filled with artifacts from years past. I don’t usually go for the stuffy, expensive, high end stuff, rather, I like to hold and examine the things that people used on a daily basis without much thought. A pyrex bowl, a hand-held egg beater, costume jewelry, an inexpensive chair, a well-worn beveled mirror, an old photograph, a dusty book with an inscription, etc.

So it was with much excitement that I knelt down and examined a spot of blue that had caught my eye as I was heading out of the door during one of my recent trips to a local antique store. It was a really cool Smith-Corona typewriter! I have been wanting one of these for so long, and the price was a steal!

So I quickly bought it and brought it home to show the kids. Mmm hmm, I really bought it for the kids. Really. The kids.

Marlena was at school, but Aidan very quickly set to work trying to figure out this strange new contraption. He was entranced. We had fun picking out letters and spelling out our names. I had to remind him two or three times not to press more than one key at a time because they would all fly up together and stick; something that I remember very vividly from my childhood. In fact, the sounds, the feel of the keys beneath my fingers, and the smell of the ink on the paper, stirred up distant memories in my head. They floated up to the surface like dust, and swirled momentarily before settling again. There wasn’t anything in particular that I could grab on to, but I thought of my dad’s office, his leather jacket, my grandmother’s office in the back of the department store where she was the manager, her willingness to let me play on her typewriter on the days that I would be with her after school, and the typewriter that was on the dresser in the guest room at a relative’s house.

The ink in this particular typewriter was very old and faint. I need to locate a new ribbon somewhere. I am a little glad that there wasn’t much ink left though, because as I was doing the dishes later, Aidan and Hope decided that it would be fun to pull the ink ribbon out and decorate themselves with it. Forgot to go over that one with them.