November 29, 2005

Copy

I started typing early on in life with two index fingers and an old second-hand portable with a shredded ribbon. Then I graduated to a couple of Royal uprights that were always two or three model designs behind the current one. Final copies were always a maelstrom that would make fractals look like order.

Fantasy took me to those machines like I was Red Barber or Scotty Weston or H L Mencken or maybe sometimes Hemingway (who probably didn’t even use one). The clatter warmed my hearing. The pressure from the keys reminded me something approaching importance just might be going on here (and rarely was).

I kept three of them for some years after getting my first computer and word processor, actually after I discovered that ribbons, if you could find them, cost nearly as much as each of the (used) machines had when first I bought them. All the whiteout had crystallized by then, as well.

The cyberwhiz systems some three Macs later never cease to amaze me. The spellcheckers insult me when I type my initials JLD, and they smartmouth back, “OLD.” And redeem themselves when I type my bishop’s name, and they report “hireling.”

But when I got up today at five ayem with a pressing idea for a homily due tomorrow at a good friend’s requiem, put it in some decent kind of shape, and started to print… Aha! The printer announced “job stopped.” About noon and after several conversations with the printer people saying it was the computer and the computer people saying it was the printer and a lot of Kenny G’s off-pitch soprano saxophone elevator tripe while on hold (why can’t they play Mozart or Basie?), it all came together again.

I miss the old Royals that were mostly always there when I needed them. But it’s nice to have the same workable two fingers and the Apple. That bite out of it reminds me that at least if my copy is not original, my sin is.

[Visit Episcopal Relief and Development at http://www.er-d.org/ to make a donation to catastrophe relief or Episcopal Migration Ministries at emm@episcopalchurch.org to volunteer to assist displaced people with housing.]

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