My whole life has been shaped by rapid tech innovation. That’s the blessing and the curse of being a millennial—we grew up knowing the before and after of a world that’s swiping our humanness from us.
So I’ve decided I want to get a typewriter.
Before my dad’s parents passed, they’d downsized. When they did, cleaning out their house was like something out of a movie. Most people probably would’ve called them hoarders. Grandma would’ve said they were collectors, Pa might’ve mumbled something about being practical. To his credit, we never knew for sure if the stuff in those piles would come in handy one day. But they were there... just in case.
In the entryway of their split-level home, going downstairs would lead you to Pa’s office. Until the day they moved out, I’d never made it further into the labyrinth than that. Discovering there was a door on the back wall of that room was shocking. “So that’s how you get to the garage?!” Even more surprising was learning of another set of stairs that led to a furnished basement with more rooms packed full of more stuff.
My grandfather’s office doubled as a workshop with toolboxes interspersed among the filing cabinets. That’s where he spent his time: tinkering on something when he wasn’t puttering about in the yard. My dad had a similar cave in his house when I was a kid, full of workbenches and band-saws. He’d always be fiddling with some project in the shadows of dusty shop-lights. In the background, he’d have Baywatch muted on the TV, and the sound of country music from his 8-track player filling the space.
My mom never had a bunker like that. Sure, she kept boxes in the basement of our house, but those boxes held her memories.
Hundreds of photographs—maybe thousands—made up albums and scrapbooks from her life. Some had even been passed down from people I’d never met but who I’d hear about while looking at their photos. Those boxes held stories. Sometimes we’d sift through them and mom would tell me about the world before swiping. I remember hearing tales of her Uncle Wolfgang, the prankster who lived in Germany, and how he’d combat roll his kayak with her in it to scare my grandmother. “He’d always pop back up and laugh with a mischievous ‘he he he’” she’d tell me.
Photos would be sprawled out across the floor sometimes.
Mom would point to one and say, “that’s me playing the accordion as a kid.” She’d wanted to take guitar lessons but the teacher made her learn the accordion first. Then we’d find childhood photos of her and my aunt learning to ski and place them next to ones of them teaching my cousins and I to do the same. Black and white images would get plucked out of their clear, plastic sleeves and held gently by the edges before getting passed into my hands for a closer look. Meanwhile, my friends and I began creating Myspace pages on our family’s desktop computers. Eventually, we’d go from uploading Facebook photos in the kitchen, to snapping, swiping, and sharing memories from our phones.
We went from telling stories to posting them.
Instead of dusty workbenches and toolboxes, or a basement full of memories, I have a desk. Sometimes, there’s a MacBook perched on top, and it asks me if I want to upgrade my storage. So I’m looking for a typewriter. That way I can catch words that collect dust instead of pixels. And maybe one day, I’ll point to a filing cabinet and tell stories about the people on the pages inside. When I do, I bet there’ll be blues-rock playing through a bluetooth speaker. Somewhere in the background, I’m sure I’ll have a muted snowboard movie going on the TV.
So, yes, I want to upgrade my storage. But I want that to mean I can hold its contents—gently by the edges—and pass it into the hands of others who’ve been swiping too long to remember an analog life.
What’s a favorite memory that you hold close? How do you store it? How do you prevent it from getting swiped?
onward.
P.S. Know any tips for tracking down an Olympia SM4 typewriter? I’d love to chat!
If you enjoyed reading this, I write short reflections like it every day as part of an email series called BUDS (Becoming Unobstructed Daily Snippets). Think of them like field notes for navigating agency, grief, and creativity in daily life.
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Beautifully told, Derek. You've shown it is possible to hold the same picture, simultaneously, one in the hand and the other in the mind, differently, and both can transport us you to other worlds. By the way, I think I've been in your grandparents' home before. Excellent prose. Thanks for sharing.
It's fascinating, isn't it Derek, how holding a photo - usually the only one of its kind - is a different experience than scrolling through it on your phone. There's an energy in that image, knowing your mother or grandmother also touched that image; maybe even took that image and had the film developed and printed, resulting in that very image. To me, it's in the same vein as meeting someone IRL versus on Zoom or through some social platform. It's just a different experience. P.S. Something must be in the air. I just wrote about essentialism where the story behind the object adds value to it beyond it's original value.