My Qwerty Summer shaped the rest of my life. It gave me a skill that I use to this day. The Summer that I was turning thirteen and about to enter high school, my ever-practical mother decided that I should learn to type. The girls private school that I went to during the academic year offered typing, but taking the class would have meant forgoing some other course in my rigorous academic program. In Mom's opinion, Summers were not idle time, but ideal time for my self-improvement. So, Mom sent me to the local high school to take typing.
I grew up in a small New Jersey town on the commuter railroad line to New York. When I was growing up, high school students were not bussed to school. The students rode the railroad and walked from the center of town up the hill to the high school. The school itself was built in 1927, long before air conditioning was part of the HVAC plan for new buildings. Old style, sputtering radiators warmed students in the Winter, and cooling for Summer School was not even an after thought. The windows did not open, or so the typing teacher said, so we sweltered and hoped class would end before the typing room became unbearable. Add to the pleasure, the building itself was musty and had an aroma that I still associate with old public school buildings. It is an oh-so-familiar cedar oil smell from the sweeping compound used to clean the floors.
For six weeks during my Qwerty Summer, I boarded the train each morning, walked up the hill, entered the nearly empty high school for another day of learning to type. The typewriters were large gray manual standard office models. If my memory is accurate they were Royals -- royal pains to work on. Each class we were allotted a few sheets of canary yellow paper for the day's lessons. These included lots of timed tests, for me lots of errors, and lots of repetition. By the end of each day, I was grateful to get outside, breathe the cool (or so it seemed) air and wander back to the station to catch a train that would bring me home in time to grab a late lunch.
By the end of the Summer, miraculously I found that I could in fact type and fairly fast to boot. This marked a time of intellectual liberation for me. I could now neatly type whatever I wanted to put down. Even at its best, my handwriting was never a thing of beauty. Besides typing my thoughts seemed to elevate them in my mind. On my next birthday, Mom gave me my very own portable typewriter, another gray machine with its own brown leatherette case. I was living large. It was workhorse. I typed papers on it until I finished college. It set me on my way to becoming a writer.
Throughout high school, I developed the habit of writing and typing reports on almost every book I read, movie reviews of the few movies I saw and essays on every imaginable topic. I typed them on lined loose-leaf paper (it was what I had) and put them in a red and blue binder. It was quite handy to have a book report always at the ready. As needed, I would select an appropriate report, edit it to my satisfaction and prepare it for submission. My stash of materials in the notebook was mine, and over time I realized that some of my writings were too personal to risk just leaving around for the ever-curious eyes of family members, so I took a step I now regret and threw the entire contents in the trash after I entered college. Today, I would love to see my fresh young thoughts with my mature eyes.
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