Old friends

An appointment today leaves me short of time, but I have a small numbers of photos from yesterday’s brief reprieve from the overcast that has become our norm.

As I look out a window, I see flurries of snow, but it won’t amount to much with the temperature just on freezing.

Strangely, I always feel colder when the weather is like this than during a deep freeze.

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Yesterday was one of those times when we just turned off on a random road and went where the car took us, at least until it began making unattributable noises.

My computer doesn’t like that word, but it appears in the dictionary, so I don’t know why.

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My computer has been told that its operator is British, but it always wants to correct my spelling and as I no longer have any confidence that I can remember such things, I check.

Yet some words I type are utter nonsense and the computer is quite happy with those, so if I don’t notice, they remain to make me look a fool.

When I do pick up those mistakes, I am never certain whether I actually wrote what I see, or if I simply hit the wrong keys.

Or if the computer decided I meant a different word and changed it for me.

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One problem that is certainly mine is that my fingers appear to have become dyslexic. By which I mean that although they type the correct letters, they get them in the wrong order.

What a good job I don’t any longer have to use an old fashioned typewriter. I would need gallons of white-out. But then I would hardly be writing a blog on a typewriter.

The portable Olivetti I had seems so long ago, part of some else’s history.

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That typewriter served me well for many years, but around the time I first bought property, I also acquired a computer, so the Olivetti became redundant and I put it in one of my bring-and-buy sales. It was purchased by a colleague who sadly died the next day.

One of those curious events that sticks in your mind for no particular reason.

It’s strange to think that young people cannot know the sound of a typewriter. It was so much a part of my young life because my father spent much of his time pounding on one.

Mother contributed sound effects as well. Her sewing machine was in constant use. Each time we moved, she had to get a new one because they were too heavy to transport, but they all made that same high-pitched whir.

When she wasn’t sewing or writing letters – longhand – Mum was in the kitchen cooking and finally, when she went to live in Barbados, she acquired a mixer and its selection of speeds became familiar sounds, but I only heard them when I was there for visits after I was grown up, so that is not part of my childhood memories.

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While she was herself busily occupied, Mum didn’t pay attention to my father’s typewriter, but later on it really got on her nerves, as did the television which they only got when they moved to Florida in 1980.

My father had been disdainful of television but by then he’d come around to the idea and that appliance was his pride and joy. He complained bitterly about many of the programs and the presenters, but I suspect being a critic was part of the attraction.

Until she became deaf, my mother enjoyed one or two shows, but when she began to lose her hearing, I think the muffled sound was probably an irritant and she loathed it, understandably.

Sadly, she came to feel the same way about music. My appreciation of music was acquired from listening to my father’s choices, played nightly on his record player or tape recorder, but in their last years, I never heard music in my parent’s home.

How Dad would have loved being able to tap a few buttons on a keyboard to hear any piece of music he chose! Even I can remember spending hours browsing the aisles at Tower Records and such. It was a triumph to come home with a new LP.

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Cd’s were so much more practical, yet somehow never as satisfying as those LP’s!

My collection was very humble, but in 2000 I shipped it out to Washington where I abandoned it 18 years later, regretfully. It had included a few of my father’s ancient 78’s and a couple of 45’s. But in one of my moves, I’d already given up any means of playing the records, so there was no point at all in keeping them.

Still it felt a little like abandoning old friends.

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