As Benjamin labored over Ollie at the little table in our guest room, I fell into a deep sleep before dinner. As I slept, the sun lowered behind the trees and the light grew dim outside our wall of windows. Benjamin abandoned his window-side post to seek the brighter artificial light at the kitchen table and continued his work on the typewriter. It was Friday and Ollie had only come home with us the Sunday before, but Benjamin still expected to have Ollie finished by the end of the weekend.
Later, Benjamin came into our room to gently rouse me from my sleepy state and announce that dinner was ready. Knowing my proclivity for dawdling when waking up, he whispered excitedly to me ‘…and there’s a surprise waiting for you.” My interest thus piqued, I groggily made my way into the kitchen to find Ollie sitting in my chair at the dinner table. It took Benjamin five weeks (of a rather patchy work schedule) to get Maggie in good working order so it seemed much too soon for him to be finished with Ollie already.
Yet there he sat, polished and gleaming. He was ready for his first test-run!
After dinner, we pulled Ollie onto the kitchen table and loaded his feeder with paper. While Maggie takes some finesse to load up, Ollie takes paper like a champ. Benjamin warned me that some of the keys were still a smidge sticky, but that he expected them to work their way loose with the repetition of use. As with Maggie, my first ever letter on Ollie was a thank-you letter to my grandmother - the benefactor of both typewriters. Benjamin stood behind me and looked on as I typed, watching for any sticky points so that he’d know what to focus on during future tune-ups.
While there were some sluggish, sticky keys, the most surprising development was that the carriage and key lock would activate itself seemingly at random! The keys and carriage auto-locked no less than 6 times on a 1-page letter! It was easy to decide to go ahead and permanently disable the feature, which is actually how we found the typewriter to begin with. While we assumed it had come loose (although we couldn’t tell how) the debacle certainly made me wonder if my grandfather deactivated it years ago to permanently solve the problem himself!
Besides the randomized auto-lock feature, Ollie definitely loosened up as we went along. It was a treat to reacquaint myself with his familiar feel and sounds. Other features were new to me - having only used him as a curious toy when my brother and I were kids, I’d never properly learned about all he had to offer.
With the first letter successfully behind me (despite the hiccups) Benjamin settled in on working out some of the finer details while I brought Maggie and my letter-writing box in to make the kitchen table letter-writing central. There I lingered late into the night, flanked by my two typewriters, listening to chill music, and keeping all of my favorite snail-mail supplies close at hand. Ollie will need a little more TLC at some point (he’s still not operating as smoothly as Maggie), but for now he’s more than serviceable. We’re getting on swimmingly and enjoying each others company. It’s great to be back in the company of an old friend.
