Slide Rules and Typewriters: A Memoir of Christmas Presents Past
Career Counseling
My cousin taught high school math. At Christmas, he gave me complicated puzzles. One year he gave me a slide rule. I kept it a long time. It seemed like something I should be able to make work. It looked inviting with its ruler-like lines and numbers and the cool middle slide that I could move back and forth. My cousin said it could multiply and divide and find square roots and algorithms, whatever they were. Every once in a while, I’d take it out and try to perform some simple calculation—two times two, for instance—but I could never get anything to compute. I’m sure some other boy, more mathematically inclined, could have had more luck, but he’d never have the chance. I held onto that slide rule just to spite the boy my cousin must have thought I was when he gave it to me.
Career Counseling (Take 2)
I took my first typing class when I was a sophomore in high school. I needed to learn to type, 
my teacher told me if I intended to go to college. My parents told me that was what I indeed intended, so I set about learning to touch type, relying on muscle memory to locate the keys without looking at them. To help me practice at home, my parents bought me a portable typewriter—a Smith-Corona Galaxie Deluxe. It came in a hard plastic carrying case, gray, and it had a ribbon that was black on the top half and red on the bottom half. I could push a lever on the upper right side of the keyboard to change the color. The keyboard was cream-white, its metal casing sky blue. I loved the feel of my fingers pressing down on the keys, the clacking noise they made, and the bell that rang to tell me it was time to return the carriage. I’d seen Dick Van Dyke, as Rob Petrie, use a typewriter to write television scripts on The Allen Brady Show, and I thought the life he had seemed like a fine life—high jinks with his writing partners, Buddy and Sally; the glamor of the entertainment business; a fine wife and son in a fine home in the suburbs. I lived in a town of a thousand people in southeastern Illinois. Our house was a modest frame house with clapboard siding. I was an only child and through books I’d discovered the pleasure of a life lived inside the imagination. I had no idea what I wanted to do with that life, but I somehow sensed that typing was the way to find out. So I practiced. I typed the exercise my teacher taught me. I typed it again and again, ink pressed to paper:
Now is the time. . . .
Now is the time. . . .
Now is the time. . . .
