Part of being an artist is being a nonconformist.

This explains why Ian, in recent years, has taken to:

Wearing a wristwatch instead of checking his phone for the time

Writing in cursive, in ink, on paper

Sending letters, in envelopes, through the mail

Wearing bowties

Watching movies, in video format, on our old VCR

Buying old Power Ranger videos to screen back at MICA (no doubt he’s buying back some of the very videos we gleefully cleaned out and got rid of several years ago)

Typing on a manual typewriter

He found this oh-so-1970s typewriter, called a Sky Writer, at Goodwill the other day.  Despite the fact that it is etsy gold and he could easily make a killer profit on his $8 purchase, he’s not going to sell it – yet. 

I think he’s going to write Christmas thank-you notes on it.

His brothers were fascinated by the acquisition and everyone had to take a turn on the entrancing old typewriter where your letters appeared on the paper – as you struck the key – as if by magic. 

Of course what they wrote were flowery descriptions of how bad the other guys smell, but still.  They were writing.

My boys have no idea how magical the computer is to people like, say, their parents.  Back in the 1980s, we were liberated from typewriter ribbons, tiny bottles of Wite-Out, Daisy Wheels, and spinning IBM Selectric globes full of letters. 

We remember when Erasable Bond was wondrous. 

Those memories are too fresh.  And so to us, Word is king.

To them, Word is ho-hum. 

Typewriters are amazing.  Go figure.

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