My Cow Pasture Backyard

This is what happens to a yard when you don’t do anything to it for months. You don’t mow it. You don’t trim it. You don’t even go out and look at it. You end up with a cow pasture. We do have some nice California poppies growing wild.

My Smith-Corona Electra 210

This typewriter is an elite machine which types 12 characters per inch. It’s a good, steady typer and I use it often.

Robert Lowell and Tom Fasano

The older I get the more I look like the poet Robert Lowell. If I could write poetry like Lowell, I’d be set.

Typing on a Smith-Corona Electra 210

This machine has a fine touch and doesn’t require the pressing and punching of the keys that manuals demand. For general typing, this is one of the best.

Smith Corona Electra 210

This was one of the first typewriters I ever acquired — before I learned that Robert Caro types all his books on an Electra 210, a fact that turned me into a devotee of this old typer. Typing on this machine is a pure joy and makes me think that something important has gone out of the writing process in the digital world. This is not my opinion, but that of a few serious thinkers.

My Famous Typewriter

An upcoming book about the history of typewriters and keyboards used a photo of my old Woodstock No. 5 typewriter. The author said he’d been unable to find a machine that still had the decals on it, which is rare for a typewriter manufactured in 1917. Whether it was owned at one time by the infamous spy Alger Hiss is another matter. The typewriter, by the way, works beautifully. How many of our digital gadgets will still be operational 100 years from now?

COVID-19 Diary #2

After teaching school all day online, I got out for my afternoon walk. For the first time this year, it felt like an actual spring day, temperature in the lower 70s and a cool breeze. It was a welcomed change from being cooped up all day teaching from home.