Typewriters

The first typewriter I ever used was an Underwood Five. I started playing with it when I was a little kid, banging on the keys and treating it terribly. Memories of making the keys jam on purpose are particularly tactile and vivid. Eventually, I graduated to using it to type up my little short stories and poems. I wish I still had those sheets around. I wrote about bunnies and unicorns, and once even wrote a rhyming sing-song poem about two characters named Cheech & Chong -- my father suggested the names for his own amusement. At any rate, I developed an affection for that old Underwood Five. I was horrified to find it relegated to the garage, the tape chewed by mice and an abandoned nest tucked in under the keyboard. I cleaned it up and brought it home with me, and it sits unused on top of my filing cabinet, a monument to the aspirations of childhood and youth. 

I was very poor during university, due to a series of bad decisions, and found myself without a computer. Instead, I used an electric typewriter I inherited from a family member. It even had a little digital screen where I could enter the text and then hit "print" and the machine would type it all up for me, like a player piano. Documents could be saved on floppy disk. The difficulty with this machine was that it occupied a strange space between the physical quality of a typewriter and the ephemeral quality of the digital age. I didn't take care of my hardcopies because I had them on disk, but most of the disks never got transferred, ended up corrupted or lost. I still have the electric typewriter, though. It's in the back of the closet. I must have been one of the last students my professors ever saw using a typewriter. 

The desktop computer never really worked for me as a creative machine, and I blame my early exposure to typewriters. Instead, I appreciate the laptop. It kind've looks like a typewriter, if you think about it. I wrote my first novel on a crappy old PC laptop that was passed down to me by my sister-in-law. It weighed about 20 lbs. and took up a huge amount of space on the desk, but it was enough like a typewriter that I responded to it. Now I'm the proud owner of a Macbook. It's sleek and modern, but still reminds me of that old typewriter. You set it on the desk, and clackity clack, you type away. 

Maybe I'm delusional, but I see a closer relationship between my laptop and my typewriter than I would a desktop computer. The old Underwood seems more compact than my husband's big old Sony Vaio PC in the basement. It's silly and pretentious to be attached to instruments of writing, but I think most writers are. They like typewriters or fountain pens or some other thing. While I don't know what I would do without Scrivener--the best word processing program ever invented--I think my longing to keep a bit of the ghost of a typewriter with me has to do with tradition and legacy. I'll never write by candlelight with a quill and ink pot, but looking up at my typewriter lets me feel a little closer to the great writers and lets me delude myself into thinking I might one day be as good. 

I Have A Son

This is my son Jack. He was born on June 10, 2010. I've spent countless hours since talking to people about my 36 hour labour, my adventures in breast-feeding and sharing anecdotes about poop. 

Now it's time to get back to work. My husband is at home full time until March to take care of Jack and to let me be a mom and a writer at the same time. It's funny, I'm the one who's not taking time off from work. I still keep going. But that's what writing is. Even when I'm not blogging or writing freelance or doing anything that is officially part of my CV, I can't help but put pen to paper. In this way, writing is a habit or an addiction, as much as it is a craft or an art.

This blog is not intended to be a personal chronicle. Lord knows, there enough mom-blogs on the interwebs. But let me share with you something I wrote about my little boy, who smiled for the first time on Father's Day in his daddy's arms, rolled over at three weeks, and last night spent his third night in the crib instead of his bassinet:

Today is a kind of a sad day. Tomorrow my baby is one week old, and to me this is the last day that he is still just fresh from inside of me. Tomorrow he will be a verified baby, on his own in the world, and while I know he will still be precious and beautiful, and still tiny and lovely, there is something about the first week of a baby’s life that makes you feel like they are still a part of your body. His belly button still has a little piece of us attached to him, a piece that is neither him nor me. And when he looks up at me while I’m feeding him, I can’t tell where he ends and I begin.

Jack is a beautiful baby. I would have loved him even if he were ugly, but he is beautiful and that makes me happy. He has a contemplative face, like a little old man thinking very hard. While his soft round cheeks elicit comments about how cute he is, he also looks like an old soul to me, with his sighs of consternation and his exploring gaze. He likes to comfort himself with his hands, and has these little spastic flails before he can be calmed.

Yesterday, Grandma Winters came over and we worked in the garden together. I put Jack in a baby carrier on my front, and picked roses from the side out of the house to bring inside. My father had brought me an enormous bouquet of yellow roses to the hospital, and they were all wilted and made me sad. I took them out, set aside some to try and press, and refilled the ferns and wide green leaves with clusters of dark pink flowers. They’re all open and near the end, but this morning they look exuberant on the dining room table. I like to see that bouquet of pretty flowers I picked with my baby at my chest.

He’s already growing.  Are there any sentences about babies that haven’t been written? Of course he is growing. That is what babies do. And every minute of his life will be fleeting, every chance I have to catch up and appreciate what is happening whisked away too fast. This is what makes it so incredible, to watch his story from the beginning in minutiae. I was there the moment his story began. I remember feeling the crest of pain as his head popped out of me, the strange slither as the rest of him slid out into the doctor’s waiting hands, and looking up to see him hanging upside down from the doctor’s arm. He was quite purple then, and they took him away to check on him and so that they could work on me. I wasn’t doing as well as they would have liked. It took a long time, almost an hour, before I got to hold him. I’ll always regret that, and just thinking about it makes me feel heavy in my chest. Before he came out, when I would sit around and rub my belly, I thought about how scary it would be for him to come out in this world and how anxious I was to comfort him and see his little face. Instead, his first moments I only got to see in photographs, and afterwards, when I patiently waited for my bonding to happen after family poured in to see him, I was robbed again when the hemorrhaging started and they had to work so hard on me.

There were only a couple of tiny moments, and I remember them. When I first saw his face, Dave brought him over to me. His eyes were huge and dark and looked at me when I spoke to him. He knew who I was, and I kissed him. Then, later, I held him skin to skin on my bare chest and felt his warmth. I have to admit, I was so distracted with trying to get him on the breast, to re-enact the moment that had too shortly been stolen from me, it wasn’t until I put my hospital gown back on and held him swaddled, and looked down at his face that I felt that first rush of love and then it was too soon that I had to hand him off to grandparents to be admired. And when the drugs wore off and I held him in the recovery room, I ran my fingers over his soft skin and looked at his pretty face – just the prettiest baby I think in the whole world. Maybe there have been bigger eyes and fatter cheeks and smaller chins, but my baby is the most amazing I’ve ever seen.

Suddenly there is a new person in the world. And I see Dave holding him and I think, this little baby is partly me and partly him. He’s the two of us embodied in a brand new person, a whole new narrative.

Last night I sat out on the porch with him in the twilight air. There was a mourning dove, and the neighbours sat out kiddy-corner with their big blond dog. Across the sky were dappled blue and purple clouds, and the light from the fading sun fell on Jack’s face like a soft blanket. As I held him, our annual visiting robin flew away from her nest and brought back food for her babies, and if I leaned over I could see their little heads poke up as she dropped dinner in their mouths. Then Dave came out to sit – and of course I ruined the quiet by talking too much about unnecessary things. But it was perfect to sit there with him and say goodbye to the day, to hold Jack and feel those pulses of attachment move in waves over me when I rubbed his soft knees and felt his piano-player fingers wrap around one of mine. When he falls asleep his limbs turn to rubber, and he sighs with each outtake or makes squeaking noises. Sometimes, he turns to the side in his bassinette and sleeps just like his father. In the hospital, I got up in the night and came back from the bathroom to observe them sleeping in the same position – Dave on the pull-out chair and Jack in his clear plastic bed bucket.

You can’t capture it all. I understand why people put everything they can on film, but what you really have to do is just be quiet and feel as hard as you can to imprint the moment, or at least the impression of the moment, on your heart to revisit later.