A Letter to Mom
Dear Mom,
Here is the fisrt letter on my new typewriter. So far—a line in I’m having a great time though I’ve already made a nasty type and forgot to close an em-dash. I am also finding the typewriter sliding around the table a lot. I believe good typists use a silicon pad, not unlike the bibs we put on the baby, except flat and made for a table. I still have not figured out why the keyboard lacks the number one, that the number row begins at “2” and proceeds to 9 and 0 from there. I only put the number two in quotes because I accidentally shifted the key when I didn’t need to. I believe in the number 2. In any case the mystery of the missing number one—I can’t believe I’m supposed to type capital-L or a lowercase-l though now that I see either typed out they feel like reasonable solutions. I notice the typewriter brand is a Remington Rand—I wonder if that’s the same Rand (Corporation) that predicted we would stop fighting wars and instead trust the predictions of computers to settle geopolitical disagreements. I supposed—sorry, I suppose these are questions I could answer on a computer, the one, war. I won’t embark on a thing about the mechanical versus the automated or marvel at electricity’s outcroppings but I will say, as the baby rolls around at my feet, that I do dream of a world again without cords. The most pernicious vine in the home. I run around like a weasel trying to prune and stopper the three-prong buds. She’s now viciously biting the head of a cloth doll and whining because some part of the experience is incomplete for her. I have been writing her letters by hand that she will probably find over-the-line some day—TMI, as we say, but I have stories—but to the child is any portion of a parent allowed to cross a line—but I while away. Now they will be typed. And she will peer up from the floor and wonder about the banging. Right now she just wonders why I’m not feeding her. So I will call it a letter. Your son,
Caleb