One of the best things about becoming a Woman of a Certain
Age is that when you look back on your life, there’s a lot of real estate
there. I’ve started many a sentence
with, “When I was a kid, . . .” and most of the time, the eye-rolling
is kept to a minimum. Doodle and Scooby,
now 12 and 10, listen to these little remembrances like archaeologists on an
audio dig – sometimes they’re fascinated, and sometimes they can’t even imagine
what I’m talking about.
The other day, I spent an inordinate amount of time
explaining precisely what a typewriter did and how it worked. The kids eyed the machine warily, marveling
that the keys made noise, and that you couldn’t see what you’d typed before it
got printed on the page. The erase
ribbon made them giggle. They clamored
for a blank piece of paper to try it out themselves. I could hear them snorting with laughter all
the way down the hall.
And this was an electric typewriter.
I didn’t even attempt to describe the Remington manual that
I wrote all of my high school papers on – with the silver armed carriage return
that you hooked with your pinkie when the bell dinged. The kind that made that satisfying clattering
sound you associated with busy newsrooms in the movies. The keyboard that had no numeral 1 (you had
to use a lower-case L) and no semi-colon (you had to type a colon, then
backspace and type a comma over it). And
when I learned how to touch-type (with ALL of my fingers, not just hunting and pecking), I got ink all over my fingertips trying to pry stuck keys away from the
roller because I was typing too fast.
And then I turn my eyes forward. Doodle has a cell phone – not a smartphone,
just a basic bought-it-at-Walgreens model that I periodically put minutes
on. He texts his friends from elementary
school and Boy Scouts, keeping in touch as they all move toward their separate
lives.
“When I was a kid,” I say, “I had to ask permission to use
the phone, and my mother would start glaring at me at about the five minute
mark.” The kids snicker. “And, you know what? The phone was attached to the wall.”
“How did you have private conversations?” they ask.
“We didn’t,” I tell them.
For them, the telephone and the typewriter are practically
the same thing. They can commit their
thoughts to “paper” with their thumbs, and send them down the street, across
the country, around the world.
For me, the typewriter represents something that is so very
misunderstood in today’s world:
permanence. If you made a
mistake, a typographical error, you couldn’t just backspace it away. You had to unscrew the tiny bottle of liquid
paper, or in later technology, press the [x] button, line up your cursor and
re-type your mistake to erase it. You
had to acknowledge, even repeat, that stray letter or symbol in order to make
it go away.
For pre-teens, this is a difficult concept. They are so used to easily un-ringing the bell with
a flippant “j/k” (just kidding!) or smiley emoticon. They delete poorly-thought-out one-liners
aimed at their friends and it’s like the zinger never existed.
Except it did, and it does.
My job as a parent is to get them to see that there really
aren’t any take-backs. The words you write or text or say become part of our
reality, and texting “LOL” doesn’t make it funny, and doesn’t heal hurt
feelings.
Soon, Doodle and Scooby will get caught up in whatever the next iteration of Facebook or Twitter will be, and their words, their jokes, their off-hand comments will become part of the cyber-sphere. There is so little time to get them to understand that what they say, and how they say it, is un-erasable. Just like with that old fashioned typewriter, they will not be able to just delete a hurtful or unwanted comment. They will have to take the time and actually correct it, make it right. And that takes more effort than tapping backspace or delete.
