Antiques

As we prepared for this move, I gave away our Olympia portable typewriter. The ribbon was all dried out, but the machine was clean and in good working order. It turned out that a friend was seeking a mechanical typewriter as a birthday gift for a friend of his and the connection was just right. The typewriter has a long history. It was a high school graduation gift from my parents to my sister. When I was accepted to college my parents bought me a typewriter as well. After a year of using the Elite typewriter, with 12 characters per inch, my sister decided she wanted a Pica typewriter, which spaced larger characters 10 per inch. I happily accepted the Elite typewriter and gave the Pica machine to my sister. At college, I typed everything. In my freshman year, I typed up most of my class notes as a way of reviewing the material. I typed my own papers. Later I typed some papers for Susan. When we were married, we shared the same typewriter.

The typewriter moved with us to Chicago where it saw us both through graduate school. When we moved to our first parish, the typewriter was one of the first things we unpacked. It sat on my desk in the study and was used to type sermons and bulletins and letters and more. When we cleaned out our files in preparation for this move, I found pages and pages of documents that had been typed with that typewriter.

During our second parish we began using a computer more and more. We obtained a used dot matrix printer for our computer and started to use the typewriter less and less. By the time we moved to South Dakota we owned a desktop computer and an inkjet printer. The typewriter went onto a shelf in the garage and was only taken out to show friends of our children the way we used to do things before we had a computer.

I don’t think I’m going to miss that typewriter. I won’t miss getting ink on my fingers threading ribbons through the guides. I won’t miss cleaning ink from the keys. I won’t miss correction fluid and having to start over on a page when too many mistakes were made. I won’t miss having to push so hard on the keys. I’ve become a user of computers and I find the keyboards fit my hands and enable me to write what I want to write.

Good bye faithful typewriter. You were a fantastic tool that did your job well. I hope the new owner gets a lot of pleasure out of using you.

Packed in a box in Washington is the telephone from the headboard of our bed. It is a blue princess phone. My grandchildren don’t know about telephones that are connected to the wall by a cord. Their household only has cell phones. Back in the day, however, we thought we were quite modern to have a telephone in our kitchen, a second one in our study and a third in our bedroom. The bedroom phone was installed because pastors get more calls in the middle of the night than some other professions. Being able to answer the phone while still in bed was a luxury. We had the bell in the phone turned off so it didn’t ring. We could hear the phones ringing in other rooms of our house.

The phone, like the others in our house at the time, was rented from Northwestern Bell Telephone Company. We were excited to have a full time job and to be able to rent more than one phone. The blue slimline phone was modern and sleek, just wide enough to accommodate the dial. When the courts ordered the breakup of the Bell phone companies, one of the outcomes was that users were able to purchase phones from the company. We purchased that blue phone. It has remained on the headboard of our bed ever since.

I’m sure that our grandchildren don’t know how to dial a phone. They don’t even remember phones with actual buttons. What they think of when they think of a phone is a touchscreen that you swipe and tap to “dial” a number. They don’t even know why we use the language of dialing a phone.

I don’t know if we will ever use that phone again. Somehow it still works if you have a land line, but land lines are becoming scarce and we probably don’t need to have one in our new home. In the home we are moving away from we had wiring in every room for telephones, but the system was connected to a voice over internet modem. In place of the original copper telephone wire to the phone, messages are carried over the same cable that brings high speed internet to the home.

We have a few antiques that we have moved. There are pieces of furniture that have been in our family for generations. There are clocks that need to be wound - two that need weekly windings, one that needs to be wound every night. The clocks lack the precision of modern digital devices. They aren’t needed in a home that has clocks on the stove and microwave and lots of other devices that will tell you what time it is. There is a constant readout in the upper right hand corner of the screen of my laptop that is reporting the time as I write this journal entry.

We have packed up and moved a kerosene lantern. We don’t even use it when there is a power outage. I’m sure it was never lit in the last 25 years that we lived in Rapid City and probably wasn’t lit for more than a decade before that. I doubt that there are hardware stores that stock replacement glass chimneys for lanterns any more. I guess we’d look on the Internet for one if we needed one.

The world is changing and the items of the past have little value as we move into the future. However, we are hanging onto a few things out of nostalgia or memory or sentiment or respect for those who have gone before us. Many of those items will have no meaning to the next generations of our family. Still, we like having some of those things around as we move into a new phase of life. At least they will entertain our grandchildren for a little while as we explain what they are and how we used them.

I guess we too are kind of antiques. I hope they keep us around for a little while if only for our historic value.

Copyright (c) 2020 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!

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