After reading the article in the New York Times about Cormac McCarthy donating his Olivetti manual typewriter, one on which he wrote countless manuscripts, perhaps even his Pulitzer winner, I couldn't help but recall my first typewriter, a manual Smith & Corona, the color of a placid Caribbean sea. But I wouldn't have known that then, since I rarely traveled much further than beyond the small, rural town where I was raised on a farm in Upstate New York.
I was about ten years old when an aunt gave me a banged up metal typewriter that I'd unearthed from a toy box in her house. My excitement was soon quelled, though, when I discovered that the paper wouldn't lock in place; but that didn't matter because the ribbon was pretty well used up, anyway. Still, there was something about linking words together that had a hold on me and I would sit in my bedroom with piles of scrap paper and write poems and stories in longhand for hours. So when other girls were asking for Barbie dolls, I was wishing for a typewriter, one that would actually tap out a world of my own creation. Imagine how thrilled I was on my fifteenth birthday when I received that second-hand Smith & Corona as a gift
Read the full story and a lot of other entertaining stuff too at The Huffington Post.
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