Unwind and Rewind

So back in September, we took a vacation. A real vacation: one that involved leaving for a full week, not checking email (or at least, not any more often than absolutely necessary), steadfastly resisting the temptation to do work. We’d taken days, even weekends off before, but we hadn’t had a real vacation since our wedding in the summer of 2008. Burned out and exhausted – our business hasn’t had a slow period in almost two years now – we both desperately needed the break.

We packed up and went to Big Sur, setting up camp in a little tent cabin at a pleasant little campground not far from the coast. We read. We boiled a lot of water. We slept well. We took in plenty of stunning Pacific views. We rested and enjoyed fresh air for a week.

Rounding out the week, we drove into Pacific Grove, staying at our favorite B&B for a recompression time of civilized civility, wine and cheese, and quite probably TV shows about the inside life in the nation’s worst prisons (for some reason, whenever we’re out of town and staying someplace nice, the TV always ends up on Lockup – don’t ask me why). We also decided to drive up into Santa Cruz, home of our favorite California bookstore.. for when we just can’t bear another stroll through our local reading supermarket, Barnes and Noble..

Across the street from the Bookshop on Pacific was this little antique/oddity/assortment store, the kind traditionally overseen by a wizened old man with a cursed monkey paw to sell, who then vanishes into a puff of smoke as soon as the money changes hands. A collage of twentieth century trivia, ranging from a faded 1950s Coke sign to old Boy Scout manuals and records dating back to the Big Band era. A fun place to browse. Our kind of spot.

Anyway, so tucked in a corner in back, we found this little baby:

A Smith Corona Skyriter manual typewriter, circa 1962, in excellent condition. Original case, original manual. Inside the case was even a partially typewritten note thanking someone for the typewriter, given on a long ago Christmas morning.

Some time back I mentioned here my love for manual typewriters, a love unfortunately consummated only with a plastic Olympia Traveller C, a less-than-elegant Luddite holdout purchased in 2001 that emitted gunshot keystrokes proven to terrify pets (Tuck HATED the thing) and drive neighbors to call for help. That little Olympia, God rest its pathetic cranky OH MY GOD THATS LOUD soul, was retired after a dozen short stories and shipped off to cheap typewriter heaven last year, and since then I’ve done all my writing on a word processor. Not the same. Capote once pointed to Kerouac and drew the distinction between writing and typing, but writing on MS Word isn’t either one. That’s merely assembling.

So seeing this little Smith Corona – a real typewriter, a model designed specifically for the early days of commercial flight, to be relatively quiet and compact enough to take on a plane – was a ray of writer sunshine for me that day. We bought it, stuck it in our overstuffed car, and took it home to Modesto.

Tonight I managed to roll my own typewriter ribbon, prying apart an ill-fitting 2″ spool and figuring out how to effectively rewind it onto the significantly smaller metal 1962 Smith Corona spools.. my new old typewriter is running like a charm tonight. I’m picking up some creative writing again after a long hiatus – I’m rusty as hell, having to relearn/rediscover things I thought I’d figured out ten years ago – but it feels fine on this machine. And best of all, the dog’s not howling and the cats aren’t scrambling for their hiding places.

For a fifty year old machine, I think we got a pretty good deal.