Words on paper

I've been writing since I was a little boy in elementary school. Back then, the writing was usually some classroom assignment like a book report, executed by hand in ink on ruled notebook paper. In high school, the assignments were expanded to include things like term papers, but the methodology remained the same. At some point a more formal presentation was required, and I can recall a few times when my mom would type up reports for me on her old manual typewriter, much like the one pictured in the sidebar.

When I graduated college, left home, and got married (in that order), one of the first things I acquired was a little portable typewriter. It was pale green, and I loved it. In those days I corresponded with friends via what is now known as snail mail, and I'd type all my letters.

After my sojourn at Fort Sill, I decided to get an M.Ed degree in Educational Psychology, believing at the time that school counseling was my true calling. At the graduate level, every class required a lengthy research paper, and my little green typewriter came in handy. To this day, I still have a folder stashed somewhere filled with those term papers. Don't ask me why.

As my career in the public welfare bureaucracy progressed, I discovered the miracles of contemporary office equipment such as IBM electric typewriters and Xerox copiers. My job required the production of stacks of paper with writing on it: memoranda, meeting notes, proposals, employee evaluations, external correspondence, and on and on. For reasons I won't go into, I often typed this stuff myself rather than delegating the task to my secretary. Eventually, desktop computers and printers replaced the typewriters, and I learned to use word processing as a medium for generating the stacks of paper.

Now I'm retired -- I still spend time at a keyboard, but all my stacks of printed pages are stored in cyberspace. What a world !

Over time I've decided the purpose of most dreams is to make me appreciate real life. Last night's dream illustrates the point. As is usually the case, I'm either back in college or back in the welfare department; it doesn't matter which. I'm responsible for writing a lengthy document, a technical report of some kind, and I prepare it on one of those IBM office typewriters. As I recall, the finished report is about twenty single-spaced typewritten pages. I start proofreading and discover that two or three sentences on the first page need to be deleted. This means the entire report must be retyped. When I finish, I decide that another sentence on the second page is incorrect so I retype the thing again. This goes on and on -- each time I type the 20 pages, I discover another mistake and have to type them again. Finally I wake up feeling intense frustration.

In the old days, though, that's the way things were. Every typewritten word was permanent in a sense, and eventually someone was forced to invent the correction fluid called Liquid Paper. The new way is much, much better. I love my computer.