Cheek Teeth is excited to welcome our new artisan culture columnist, Ester Bloom. Ester's writing has appeared in Salon,
The Hairpin, The Awl, Nerve, The Morning News, Thought Catalog, The
Film Experience, PANK, Bluestem, Zone 3, Conte: A Journal of Narrative
Poetry, and other venues. She blogs at Full of Pith and Vinegar and tweets at Shorter Story. Ester lives in New York City.
My mother, the perfectionist, hated picking out gifts and yet felt obligated to. Every Hanukkah, eight days of torment awaited her: each candle on the menorah stood for one of eight opportunities to disappoint at least one of her three children, or her husband, or, perhaps, even the dog. And with three children, a husband, and a dog to please, what were the odds that she wouldn’t, at some point, fail?
It was an impossible task, the kind that a miscreant in Ancient Greece would have been given by the gods as a punishment. As an empathetic child, I felt her pain. When she had her Hanukkah Breakthrough of 1992, I felt her glory and triumph, too. Instead of proceeding on her annual doomed, mythological voyage through the aisles of Toys “R” Us, my mother realized, she could circumnavigate the torture. She could shift the burden onto us.
The idea was both brilliant and simple: my mother would take a $10 bill into work with her and make 24 copies of it in the Xerox machine. Each night, in lieu of a brightly-packaged but potentially underwhelming gift, my mother would present us with one of the bills—an IOU, essentially, for what amounted to, over eight nights, $80 each. At the end of the holiday, we could use our $80 credit with my mother to buy whatever we wanted. Voila! Problem solved. (This was a Kids Only solution, for better or for worse, and my father had to endeavor to be content with sweaters. But as he never stepped up to be the parent primarily responsible for purchasing holiday cheer, that seemed fair.
The first Hanukkah of the new regime, thrilled with the new arrangement, I dragged my mother past the toy store and even past the book store until we got to Staples and I picked out what every ten-year-old girl dreams of: a brand-new electric typewriter. It was broad, boxy, massive, about as chic as a cinderblock, and about as heavy as one too. I didn’t care. I loved it from the moment my bemused mother handed the bemused clerk my $80.00 and we managed to lug the typewriter into the car.
I knew that typewriters were on their way out. In third grade, we started taking computer classes at school; we had an Apple II GS at home, too, on which my brothers and I played sophisticated games like Arkanoid and “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” As soon as laptops became available, my mother “borrowed” a Toshiba from her office to bring home for me to use. It had no mouse or graphical capabilities; type showed up green on a cramped black rectangular background. I used that Neanderthal laptop, but I didn’t have an emotional relationship with it. My heart belonged to my IBM Selectric.
It wasn’t about nostalgia for me. Something just felt so organic, so natural, about the process of composing on the Selectric. Type showed up as black on white, so that a page of text looked exactly like a page should. Best of all, when I finished typing a page, I could extricate it from the typewriter’s jaws and add it to a pile as clean and wholesome as newly-washed laundry. No printer required! It was intuitive, it was rewarding, it was concrete. And it was effective. Within a year, using the typewriter, I had branched out from writing short stories in the style of Roald Dahl and Mildred Taylor to writing a full-length musical, a parody of the story "The Princess and the Pea." Granted, the songs only had words, but I figured someone else would supply the melodies.
The typewriter made it possible. Watching the pages accumulate next to me made my writing real and made my ambition, in turn, real too. Suddenly I wanted to write something more substantial—I could, and I did.
As computers got better, I needed the typewriter less and my attachment to it became more sentimental. When we finally got rid of it, I hadn’t used it for years. By then, my mother had discovered that Xeroxing money is a felony, and using federal government equipment to do so only compounds the offense, so she went back to picking us out presents as best she could. But she couldn’t put Pandora back in the box: her Hanukkah Breakthrough changed things. It helped turn me into a writer.
It was an impossible task, the kind that a miscreant in Ancient Greece would have been given by the gods as a punishment. As an empathetic child, I felt her pain. When she had her Hanukkah Breakthrough of 1992, I felt her glory and triumph, too. Instead of proceeding on her annual doomed, mythological voyage through the aisles of Toys “R” Us, my mother realized, she could circumnavigate the torture. She could shift the burden onto us.
The idea was both brilliant and simple: my mother would take a $10 bill into work with her and make 24 copies of it in the Xerox machine. Each night, in lieu of a brightly-packaged but potentially underwhelming gift, my mother would present us with one of the bills—an IOU, essentially, for what amounted to, over eight nights, $80 each. At the end of the holiday, we could use our $80 credit with my mother to buy whatever we wanted. Voila! Problem solved. (This was a Kids Only solution, for better or for worse, and my father had to endeavor to be content with sweaters. But as he never stepped up to be the parent primarily responsible for purchasing holiday cheer, that seemed fair.
The first Hanukkah of the new regime, thrilled with the new arrangement, I dragged my mother past the toy store and even past the book store until we got to Staples and I picked out what every ten-year-old girl dreams of: a brand-new electric typewriter. It was broad, boxy, massive, about as chic as a cinderblock, and about as heavy as one too. I didn’t care. I loved it from the moment my bemused mother handed the bemused clerk my $80.00 and we managed to lug the typewriter into the car.
I knew that typewriters were on their way out. In third grade, we started taking computer classes at school; we had an Apple II GS at home, too, on which my brothers and I played sophisticated games like Arkanoid and “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” As soon as laptops became available, my mother “borrowed” a Toshiba from her office to bring home for me to use. It had no mouse or graphical capabilities; type showed up green on a cramped black rectangular background. I used that Neanderthal laptop, but I didn’t have an emotional relationship with it. My heart belonged to my IBM Selectric.
It wasn’t about nostalgia for me. Something just felt so organic, so natural, about the process of composing on the Selectric. Type showed up as black on white, so that a page of text looked exactly like a page should. Best of all, when I finished typing a page, I could extricate it from the typewriter’s jaws and add it to a pile as clean and wholesome as newly-washed laundry. No printer required! It was intuitive, it was rewarding, it was concrete. And it was effective. Within a year, using the typewriter, I had branched out from writing short stories in the style of Roald Dahl and Mildred Taylor to writing a full-length musical, a parody of the story "The Princess and the Pea." Granted, the songs only had words, but I figured someone else would supply the melodies.
The typewriter made it possible. Watching the pages accumulate next to me made my writing real and made my ambition, in turn, real too. Suddenly I wanted to write something more substantial—I could, and I did.
As computers got better, I needed the typewriter less and my attachment to it became more sentimental. When we finally got rid of it, I hadn’t used it for years. By then, my mother had discovered that Xeroxing money is a felony, and using federal government equipment to do so only compounds the offense, so she went back to picking us out presents as best she could. But she couldn’t put Pandora back in the box: her Hanukkah Breakthrough changed things. It helped turn me into a writer.
" And with three children, a husband, and a dog to please, what were the odds that she wouldn’t, at some point, fail?" Stitches.
ReplyDeleteI am currently at the Holmes Beach Library in Florida sharing a small room with an IBM (correcting) Selectric II. Coincidense? I think not. Nice writing Ester.
I learned to type on an IBM "ball machine" my freshman year of high school. When we switched to computers in the spring semester, I changed my class schedule and learned the trombone instead.
ReplyDeleteWell done, Ester, and welcome aboard.