Father, You recall that as one of five kids, I cherished the rare privilege of dipping the first spoon into a jar of peanut butter. With PB & J overdoses during Hubby’s stint in medical school, however, my thank-You-for-this-food prayers didn’t ring true. But, OMG, thank You that simple joys, along with gratitude, can return. (And that I now dip that first spoon a lot.)
When my future husband graduated from high school, his parents gave him a manual typewriter.
If a fussy professor at our college demanded typed assignments, perhaps I’d ask to borrow his gift. I’d hunt and peck because I’d taken no typing classes. After all, I’d planned to major in music.
Unfortunately, I dropped out. My medical-school-student fiancé and I married when even fast-food jobs were scarce. No one paid singers, even if they knew 10 Italian songs and five German. Would the typing classes I’d taken at night help me find work?
Yes! We would eat.
However, I refused to sacrifice my lunch hour to type Hubby’s papers on my office’s Selectric. At home, the manual machine made me crazy.
He typed. In our one-room apartment. At night.
Clackety-clack … clack-clack-clackety-DING!
I buried my head in my pillow. Midnight came. One o’clock.
Clackety-clackety-clack …
DING!
When I later worked at a medical center, my speed increased and I learned to spell words like “ecchymosis” and “telangiectasia.” Then I worked in a newspaper’s secretarial pool, where we typed obituaries and The Cow News (stockyard reports) on a word processor.
Weird.
No paper, carbons or correction fluid — yay! No “ding,” and clacks morphed into taps.
When our children were born, I quit typing. Little fingers would have turned my attempts into Sanskrit.
A decade later, though, as a church choir director, I wrote newsletter articles. Despite rusty skills, my fingers navigated a computer.
Amazingly, I found myself writing newspaper and magazine articles.
Now, having published more than 800 short pieces and 27 books, I type much faster than I write. This longtime marriage of mind and fingers works. Will I follow current dictating trends and break them up?
No way.
Hubby uses dictation, though, murmuring a pleasant background as I work elsewhere. His late-night sessions remind me he’s there. I like that.
What if we had to use manual typewriters? Clackety-clack-DING! 10,000 times a day? My predawn inspirations would prove fatal. He’d never live to teach.
If either partner wants to wreak post-spat revenge, the cobwebby manual still resides in our garage.
No. Let’s leave that antique in the garage, where it belongs.
Besides, even for this antique pair, making up is much more fun.
Your Extraordinary Ordinary: What was your first typing device?
Do you also wish a superhero would swoop down and fly you to a beach where sunshine is the only butt-warmer needed?
My Super Swooper hasn’t appeared. Still, throughout my life, small-time heroes have popped up like crocuses through snow.
My family was staying in a church’s back rooms with no bathing facilities. Mom’s friend shared her old-fashioned bathtub, making the world a less stinky place.
Unknown drivers pulled over 1950s Chevys to give my young father rides to work.
As a preschooler, I pilfered a necklace from Etta, the Church Lady. Mom forced my confession before Etta and God. Both pardoned me. Later, Etta gave me a necklace of my very own.
A preacher gave me a Hershey bar and told me I could sing.
Serious hero points go to children’s education leaders who kept straight faces and saved mine. Assured any scripture memorization qualified for a prize, I recited Song of Solomon passages. Unknown to me, they weren’t about palm trees and goats.
As a teen driver, I smashed a pastor’s car, yet he maintained his religion.
At my first job, I dumped salads with French dressing on a lady wearing a white suit. She waved off my tearful apology: “No problem. I have six kids.”
A college student, I worked summer nights in a rough Western town. The cook drank coffee out front, wearing a snarl no cowboy challenged. “If anybody hassles you, I’ll break ’em in two.”
Less menacing, a couple with small children picked up my boyfriend and I for church every week.
Despite my future in-laws’ visions of a marital Titanic, they supported our wedding during medical school.
Other small-time heroes zoomed in:
An unemployed couple slid 10 dollars under our door.
A child brightened my tough workday by saying I was pretty.
A stranger, concerned about my pregnancy, pushed my shopping cart and unloaded groceries.
A snowplow operator cleared our driveway, with homemade bread for payment.
I’d asked a Burger King counterperson to reheat cold fries. Upon hearing I’d been dieting and hoped to enjoy a treat, she handed me smoking-hot replacements.
A young college student carried this old adult student’s backpack up three flights of stairs.
A grouchy, nonfiction editor didn’t throw me out for mistakenly pitching fiction to her at 8:00 a.m. She ultimately published several of my pieces.
A writing friend grabbed me before I entered an important meeting wearing a Chiquita banana sticker on my power-suited butt.
All these and more have rescued me. I can’t count how many times my family has saved me.
Who needs Super Swooper, anyway?
Your Extraordinary Ordinary: Who are your small-time heroes?