A Lovely Way to Say Hello

My father showed me a letter he received the other day from his friend in San Francisco. It arrived in a stamped envelope, with the remains of a broken wax seal on the back. The letter was three pages long, typed on fairly substantial paper with an ivory color—not the pure white of printer paper.

The most amazing thing to me was the words on the paper—not initially the words themselves, but how they got there. They were typewritten, a cascade of letters, some darker than others. The spacing wasn’t uniform. The whole thing looked organic, not like a sterile page of perfection spilling out of a printer. I could see mistakes—a “k” typed over an erroneous “j,” and a misspelled word or two.

After an intense year of word processing—research manuscripts, applications, emails, and texts to friends—I found everything about the letter satisfying.

I thought about it in reverse chronology: his friend walking to a post office or mailbox to send it; buying the stamp; folding the pages neatly to fit inside the envelope; sealing it with melted wax; sitting down at his desk and typewriter; and gathering his thoughts before striking the keys.

I thought about the physical effort of typing, and the mental effort of making sure the words made sense in his head before committing them to paper. They could not be copied and pasted or moved around on the page. All the word processing had to take place in his head, not on the page.

My father and I got to talking, and he seemed to take great satisfaction in recounting horror stories of typing late-night high school and college papers. He spoke fondly of something called White-Out, which led me to do some research later. I was happy to discover that it was invented by Bette Nesmith Graham, the mother of Michael Nesmith of the Monkees (I'm A Believer, Last Train to Clarkesville).

It all seemed romantic—words from a friend worth keeping; effort and emotion you could hold in your hand; thoughts that traveled from the mind, down the arm, and into a key that pushed back against the finger before striking a letter onto the page.

And, of course, I realized that I would never want to type a 75-page manuscript on a typewriter.

But between friends, it seemed like a lovely way to say hello.