One of my earliest memories is using a typewriter to write “stories”. I wish I still had some of those. I remember being inspired by a Scholastic book called “The Boxcar Children” about some orphaned kids who lived in an abandoned train boxcar. I wonder if that book actually exists or if I confabulated it somewhere along the line? Memory is a strange country, folks.
The kids in my apartment building and general neighborhood broke in to a locked up standalone garage down the street once, where an old car was parked. It might have been my dad’s Triumph race car? I can’t tell if these are real memories or if I’m inventing them out of whole cloth. The events would be, if real, over 50 years old at this point. I can see some of the other kids’ faces, but others are just generic fuzzy images. I know my sister was there, if it’s something I actually know or not. We did not get caught but then I went and tried to type it up as a story using the family typewriter, a mechanical and not at all easy to use device that often locked up, all the type arms jamming together and requiring delicate untangling before it could be used again.
Maybe the typewriter jammed because I did not know what I was doing? Surely not. OK, yes, that is almost certainly the issue.
I loved the sound that thing made, sharp crisp metallic spring-loaded typefaces smacking into the paper. The little “ding” of the bell when it reached the end of a line, the ratchet sound of hitting the arm, rotating the cylinder to move the paper down, and slamming the whole thing back to start another line.
The title “Red Barn Kids” emerges from the memory pool. The garage was red, but I do not believe it was a barn. But “Red Garage Kids” doesn’t sound as good, does it?
I can see myself sitting in our living room, the tiny TV in one corner, me on the couch with a laminated TV tray unfolded in front of me, the heavy mechanism of the typewriter holding down the shaky metal legs of the tray, and me pounding those keys with my fingers, one finger on each hand since I was, what, 7 or 8 years old and had not learned nor even knew about ten-finger typing yet? That wouldn’t be for another 10 years at least when I took typewriting class in high school, a skill I use daily thanks to computers being, y’know, a thing now.
Kids breaking in to a barn to look at an old car isn’t much of a story. That’s my thought now. More of a scene, or a vignette. It needs conflict, tension, resolution. Why are they breaking in? Just bored? To retrieve something? Does anyone get hurt, or scared, or refuse to enter? Clearly this story is not ready yet to be published.
Would be nice, though, to see what 7 year old me committed to paper. Actual paper, I mean. That kid had goals and the tools with which to achieve them.
I found the books: it’s the Boxcar Children series by Gertrude Chandler Warner et. al., first published in 1924 for gods’ sakes. You can google them if you’d like, but holy crap they were old even when I read them as a kid.