Looking Back

Looking Back

           I had long felt during my working years that when I finally retired I would write the ‘Great Canadian Novel.’ But alas that seems now not to be a realistic possibility. I like to put the blame on computers for that failing. They are bullies, with their constant ‘upgrades’ which I like to call downgrades, taking me down from what I was becoming somewhat comfortable with to a Brave New World of confusion and despair. That bullying hits me hard, especially early in the morning, which had been my best time for writing when I was a teenager writing poems. I would write them before I went to school, sometimes slipping one into the locker of a girl that I fancied.  

           One of the nasty curses my computer inflicts on me sometimes, is when it decides that I need to start my day looking at a long term black screen with a seemingly endless spinning of the little clockwise circle of lights. That is just not conducive to story writing. Words come fast when I’m writing, but they can leave my recollection just as quickly when the screen is black. And my handwriting is bad, especially when I am in a hurry. A grade three teacher once wrote on my report card, “John needs to work on his writing.” I never did, and it still shows. My signature is different every time I sign my name.

           I guess I will have to find another way to fill up all the time I now have on my hands now that I am staying at home all day. I have never been able (definitely a good thing) to watch t.v. for long periods of time. I bore too easily, and the shows with plotlines lack imagination.  Books, especially long ones, are harder for me to read now as an old man. I keep forgetting who some of the characters are and what the relationship is between them and the main characters of the novel. That forces me to flip back through the pages to learn who and what they are. Finnish novels I like as they sometimes have a list of the characters and what their jobs and who their relationships are at the back of the book. But there aren’t that many Finnish novels translated into English for me to read over a long period of time.

           I guess that I really should clean out the garage. Those are not words I thought I’d ever think, let alone say out loud in the solitude of our backyard as I cut the grass with a push mower. The garage is not so much a man cave as a man dump. That’s what my wife rightfully calls it. There hasn’t been a car in there since we moved in about 20 years ago, largely because a fence had to be built across the driveway to prevent the dogs from running away. I suspect that there might be lots of worthwhile items that have disappeared from my life that are secretly hiding inside the disorderly wasteland of the garage. Who knows what might turn up that hasn’t yet outlived its usefulness?

Cleaning Out the Garage: Step One

           My first step in cleaning out the garage is to decide that any organizational plans I might put together while standing outside of the building, with the large door not yet open, will be useless. I decide to fight disorganization with disorganization. You can’t just say, “I will put all the tools in one place” when there are no open spaces inside the garage in which to put them. I am content at this point to leave them on the workbench, where I suspect most but not all of them reside.

           I begin my actual work by opening a few boxes that are placed precariously near the door. I find that they are filled with books. So I guess that I will deal with them first. I force myself to remember that I am no longer a college professor, so I don’t really need the old textbooks, or the other pithy tomes deep in information about the subjects that I used to teach. It will still be hard on the heart to separate them from my possession. I steel myself to the task, first walking to a nearby grocery store to borrow a shopping cart.  It does not take long for the cart to fill up. I push it down the driveway, through the gate to the end of the driveway by the road. I then empty the contents of the cart into two very large garbage bags. With a black marker I slowly write a big K on two pieces of white cardboard and staple them to the bulging bags. I hope that the Kidney charity people know a lot of folks who are avid readers of books about biology.

A Delightful Discovery

           I reckon that this might not be my only load of books, so I return to the garage with the shopping cart, and check out a very dirty box that had been beneath the boxes that had contained many of the books. It must have been there a long time, as the others were not nearly so dusty.  I wipe it clean with a sleeve of my sweatshirt, warning myself that I will have to change it before my wife discovers the state it is in.

           I then open up the box. To my great surprise, there is an old friend inside – my old typewriter. Wow! I take it out of its long term home, and carry it lovingly to my office in the basement. That’s enough garage cleaning for the day. I can now begin to write my novel. After a day’s writing, interrupted only by my wife’s comment about my sweatshirt, I begin to worry about how long the old ribbon will last.

Typewriters Anonymous

           I tell a few friends about my discovery, and my concern that the ribbon will end its life before I can finish the novel I have just started. One of them, who reads two entire newspapers every day, tells me that he had recently read about an organization called “Typewriters Anonymous” that might prove useful to me. 

           It certainly did. Typewriters Anonymous is housed in an old and quite decrepit warehouse filled with loads and loads of old typewriters and typewriter equipment, including many more ribbons than I would ever conceivably need. 

           The president of Typewriters Anonymous owns the building, had worked in it as a young man, and didn’t want it destroyed when the business shut down, and he inherited it from his very wealthy father. Many of the members are, like me, writers, who are retired and really do not like computers. I discover this when I first walk into the building and am greeted by some chatty fellows who want to welcome a fellow believer.  The next day, I begin typing away in the warehouse with the other writers, my wife being happy that I am ‘getting out of the house finally’. The clackity clack of typewriters, and even the slamming of the carriage return make the writing experience more enjoyable to me, putting me in mind of the two years I took a typing course as an elective in junior high. Two months later, well supplied with typewriter ribbons, I finish the first draft of my novel.  

           There is more good news. Through the assistance of one of the members, the guy who sits beside me in the warehouse and has a lot of energy for an old man, I find a publisher for my novel

           The novel is called ‘Looking Back’, and there are references in the Foreword to identifying aspects of every character. The publisher persuades me not to include all the page references on which each character can be found as that would encourage too much skimming and not enough reading straight through. The villains of the novel are robot-like computers, who possess names referred to in the Forward. They want to take over the world, create an AI-topia. The hero is, unsurprisingly a retired biology professor who writes letters to newspapers with his typewriter to warn people of the dangers of the menacing machines. Their programmers were to be arrested, but it was discovered that they were robots too (something I’ve long suspected). I wanted to include a law in which so-called upgrades have to be voted on by the public, not automatically imposed, but the publisher said that was a bit unrealistic.